Introducing modern design philosophy to improve product development

The Economist offers authoritative insight and opinion on international news, politics, business, finance, science, technology and the connections between them. The Espresso app brings subscribers a daily digest of the news in five short articles.

With subscribers increasingly consuming content on their mobile devices, The Economist realized the need to change their mobile strategy, adopting a reader-centric approach while evolving their digital teams’ ways of working. Our challenge was to identify engagement strategies for Espresso, while creating a design process that could be replicated and scaled to other areas of their business.

Our collaboration resulted in the launch of two high-value feature areas for the Espresso app plus a backlog of potential features, while also fundamentally changing how The Economist develops digital product.

Espresso was recognized as App of the Year by the British Media Awards and Best News App by the Tabby Awards.

Offerings

Brand Design
Product Design
Research & Insights
Service Design
Software Engineering

“GlobalLogic is quite happy 
in challenging us in a professional manner… they come up with ideas, we come up with ideas, we test the ideas together, and then we’ll put into production the best of those ideas. That’s very different than a customer supplier relationship.”

Jora Gill, Chief Digital Officer, The Economist

Accelerating The Economist

PRODUCT ACCELERATOR

We utilized our Product Accelerator service, a high-paced schedule of user-centered exercises, to co-create personas, "day in the life" journey maps, and rapid prototypes for testing with readers. Participants from across The Economist, including product managers, journalists, editors, data analysts, and in-house designers worked together with Method and GlobalLogic teams.

We also devised a framework and plan enabling The Economist to replicate and scale the Product Accelerator format for other areas of their business.

A richer espresso shot

Concept generation workshops quickly identified the problems and opportunities for Espresso. The workshops surfaced two high-value feature areas – gamification and personalization.

The concepts created resonated with the subscriber base, maintained key business objectives, and aligned with brand values. Once validated, we created assets and prototypes, ready for development and beta testing.

GlobalLogic implemented the award-winning mobile application on iOS and Android, which has over 1 million weekly users in Europe, North America, Australia, and Asia.