Scout
Scout was a sophisticated personalized content recommendation system. It was deployed on publishers such as the Toronto Star, Chronicle Herald, and the Charlotte Observer. It delivered personalized content recommendation to readers based on reading habits and personal taste. Over its life cycle, Scout delivered more than 35 million recommendations and increased publisher page views by as much as 7%.
The Beginnings
At first, Scout (codename Bamboo) was meant to be a personalized news site. All the initial wireframes and mockups were based on this concept.
The Widget Prototype
Soon a business decision was made to implement Scout not as a destination site, but as an embeddable widget, for use by content publishers. We built an ajax proof-of-concept prototype.
Usability Tests
We decided to run an in-house usability test on the prototype prior to releasing the product. We performed the tests in-house on 12 subjects, with one facilitator, and one observer. The tests helped us find several major issues, and as a result we made major changes to the prototype before its first release.
The First Release
Our first release was deployed on the Charlotte Observer and a few other publishers.
At the time, this was the richest content recommendation widget anywhere on the web. Besides the complexity of the recommendation algorithms and its real-time recommendations, the UI featured two viewing modes, as well as category and date-based filters. It also had an 'expand' feature that made the widget bigger, displaying more stories.
Our first release was deployed on the Charlotte Observer and a few other publishers.
At the time, this was the richest content recommendation widget anywhere on the web. Besides the complexity of the recommendation algorithms and its real-time recommendations, the UI featured two viewing modes, as well as category and date-based filters. It also had an 'expand' feature that made the widget bigger, displaying more stories.
Scout 2.0
We used Flash for the second major release of Scout. It enabled us to have an even richer UI, with fluid animations and transitions. This release was deployed on the Toronto Star, among others. It consistently helped publishers increase their page views by as much as 7%. Watch the interaction video at the end of this section.
Marketing Site & Video
Besides making the Kibboko marketing site I also worked on the demo video for Scout. After we wrote the script, I story-boarded the concept and then animated the entire video in Flash using a hand-drawn technique. This was my first experience with animation. Later I used much of what I learnt here to create demo videos for other products we made.
Scout Demo Video
