This year was pretty unusual for us and the organization, as we reset our audience strategy, hired a new publisher, and celebrated five whole years of Rest of World. It was a year of reflection and taking stock, rather than making big, bold moves.

As we worked through a major strategy reset this year, we on the product team took the opportunity to focus on features, products, and initiatives that added value and set us up for future success without taking huge, irreversible swings. To that end, at the start of the year, we set ourselves some high-level objectives: Continue to delight readers and experiment with our storytelling, focus on engaging readers and helping them discover more relevant content on-site, make Rest of World sustainable for the future, and do more good.

If you didn’t already know, the product team at Rest of World consists of a designer, an engineer, a product manager and a chief product officer. We work to help our journalism reach our audience where they are, in the right way and the right format, and we work in collaboration with the rest of the organization — on the website, newsletters, social presentation, audio, feeds, and everything in between. It's our job to ensure that our journalism serves the needs of our audience in a sustainable way. 

Here we attempt to break down our favorite things we worked on this year that helped us meet those goals.

Delightful storytelling 

One area we feel we truly excel in at Rest of World is our visual storytelling. We’re always trying to push the boundaries of what’s possible, and tell stories in unique ways that enhance the experience for our readers. We collaborate with our editorial and visuals teams to elevate our journalism and create these wonderful visual storytelling moments.

How do we know when we’re successful? Well, sometimes we win awards, but ultimately we know when we see a high level of engagement with a story, readers reach out, and we take pride in the work we’ve produced. Ultimately, if we like what we see, we think you will too.

Skype

In May this year, Skype was retired after several years of being the digital video communication tool of choice for almost everyone online globally. To mark the occasion, the editorial team wanted to write an homage to the defunct platform, and gathered anecdotes from readers across the globe describing what the platform meant to them and the impact it had on their lives.

The challenge for our team was representing these disparate anecdotes in a cohesive and meaningful way that allowed readers to dive into different formats including text, quotes, audio notes, and videos.

Joanne, our designer, drew inspiration from Skype itself and introduced playful elements and animation to create a truly delightful experience that allowed readers to peruse the story, dip into anecdotes, and evoke a real sense of nostalgia while they did it. Witness it in all its glory here.

Scrollytelling

In June, we published a story about the satellite internet market. Our editorial team wanted to compare the market dominance of SpaceX’s Starlink to other emerging internet providers like Eutelsat OneWeb, and Spacesail in a visually led way. Sometimes a picture paints a thousand words, and rather than trying to convey complex comparisons and data in text, we wanted to use simple and easily understood illustrations.

This story also marked our first experiment with video scrollytelling. As readers scroll, a video plays in sync with the narrative, with text tied to specific moments in the animation. It’s a format often used by larger newsrooms for data-rich stories, and one we’d long admired but hadn’t yet managed to pull off as a small team. Until now!

Enter Anna, senior front-end developer. Using a lightweight, open-source JavaScript scroll-trigger library alongside our existing WordPress “conveyor gallery” (which pairs text with images, but not video), Anna built a smooth scrollytelling experience that synchronizes video playback with the reader’s scroll position.

Our visuals team collaborated with an illustrator to produce the animation, and we carefully mapped the copy to key frames in the video. As with everything we build, accessibility and performance were nonnegotiable. We encoded the videos to keep them as small as possible without compromising the frame-rate required, and deliberately kept the JavaScript we loaded on the page to a bare minimum.

The most exciting part? This is no longer a one-off. With scrollytelling now in our toolkit, we can experiment with richer, more ambitious video-led storytelling in future projects.

Engagement and recirculation

As a relatively new publication, we’ve focused on growth for the last few years, but we’re now shifting to focus on engagement. That means making each visit to our site useful for the reader, helping them find what they’re looking for, and introducing them to stories and product features we think they’ll enjoy. It also means recirculating stories and projects we’ve worked on in the past that are still timely and relevant. To that end, we focused on several products, both big and small, which repurposed our existing content and presented it in new ways.

Showcase module

The homepage is not dead… We still view our homepage as the doorway to Rest of World, and we know that the people who come to our homepage are some of our most loyal and engaged readers. We also know that a large portion of them are visiting and exploring our site for the first time, and figuring out what we’re all about.

For those new and returning users, we wanted to create a dedicated space within our homepage for some of our favorite projects and stories, and present them in a visually striking and interactive way.

We created the “Showcase” as a new block within our homepage curations to elevate our visual projects, and allow readers to scroll, swipe, and explore those projects. It’s designed to be delightful to use, and allows our audience team to pin stories, order by favorites, order chronologically, and edit as needed.

The Showcase block was built with love by our former colleague and friend, Lily, who wrote about it and more here.

Tag pages

This year, we also set about giving some love to our less-trafficked pages on-site including the humble tag page. What is a tag page, you say? Great question.

Basically, all of our stories can be described by using a tag: think person, thing, company, place. Tags help us describe a story in a simple way that can be easily interpreted by machines and humans. We leverage tags in our Related Stories recirculation and homepage curations, and surface the tags as metadata on our stories, allowing search engines and LLMs to more easily categorize and crawl our content.

Every tag we create automatically generates a page, and when we looked at our analytics we saw that these pages had the opportunity to drive a long tail of engagement. To address this, we focused on making them more of a destination and elevated experience that could help readers discover more relevant content. We added a featured author section, highlighted stories, related terms and charts, and a list of all of the relevant stories.

The result is richer tag pages that readers can explore and follow to gain deeper context and understanding of a topic.

Charts

In case you didn’t already know, we’re data nerds at Rest of World, and there’s nothing we love more than a chart. Datawrapper is our platform of choice for creating data visualizations, and we’ve created many beautiful charts, graphs, and maps over the years.

Michael, our chief product officer, found a way to parse Datawrapper charts from our published stories and create a dedicated home for them on our site, which allows readers to explore our visualizations. It also allows our internal team to use it as a handy reference and visual guide.

In our dedicated Charts hub, you can dive in and explore each chart, the story it pertains to, related tags, and you can share it as well. We also have a dedicated module to display Charts from the homepage, as well as a small callout to share and explore charts within the stories.

Since launching Charts, we have seen more engagement with our data. One observation we’ve made is that our editorial team has produced some of the best data visualizations this year. It’s nice to know we’re elevating (and maybe encouraging) their great work.

Accessibility, sustainability, and growth

While we’re always looking for ways to grow and experiment, a lot of our effort goes into the less glamorous work of making sure everything works, and keeps working. We’re constantly iterating on our site, content management system, styles, and underlying tech to ensure the experience is accessible, performant, user-friendly, and visually considered. (Design matters to us.)

Brand updates

If you’ve been reading us for a while, you may have noticed that this year we moved away from our multicolor palette to a single, unified brand palette and style. This was a monumental undertaking from Joanne, with support from the entire team, and involved rolling changes out across our entire site, our social and visual assets, business assets, and illustrations. You can read more about it here.

At first, we were slightly wary of a homogeneous color palette, and worried that our single cobalt blue brand color and stark white background might flatten the site’s appearance. But we’ve learned that it’s elevated our visuals across the site, and made it so much easier to commission and create visuals that aren’t at risk of clashing with random colors. Anything we can do to reduce the cognitive load for our busy editorial team is better, too!

The new palettes and styles have also been a boon to engineering in terms of maintaining multiple colors and styles, and has opened up more possibilities to explore new palettes when designing custom projects.

You can see our beautiful new palette and updated style-guide here.

Fastly CDN

Web performance continues to be an obsession of ours, and this year we rolled out a new content delivery network to serve images across the site. We opted to use Image Optimizer service from Fastly because it included a series of useful features we could leverage including cropping, resizing, and dynamic formats.

The biggest impact of this change is that we can now render all of our images on-site in the lightweight and performant WebP file format (where supported), massively reducing image-loading times. We can also optimize, cache, and serve images more quickly — so whether you’re in Belfast or Hong Kong, our images will load faster.

Behind the scenes, this shift also simplified our image handling code. Less maintenance means more time to focus on building new things.

Public good 

As technologists who work in the tech journalism space, it’s incumbent on us to try to do good and be better by ensuring the work we do serves our journalistic mission. We want to give back to the wider community, and elevate the good work of others. 

We’re working on this, but it’s an ethos we try to bring to the features we build, and to our roadmap. (If you have ideas of what we could do, or do better, we’d love to hear from you.)  

AI narrations

Earlier this year, we developed a WordPress plug-in that generated AI narrations for our stories using OpenAI’s text-to-speech model. The goal was to make our stories more accessible to readers who might struggle with text-based reading, as well those who prefer to listen rather than read. We’ve enabled this feature only on stories that have 1,000 words or more, and this year we’ve generated 161 story narrations.

In November this year, we made the AI Narrations plug-in completely open-source, and free to use and extend as needed. It was our first time open-sourcing a utility we use in this way, and we hope to do more of this in the future, as our way of giving back to the wider journalism community. You can read all about it here.

Contributor index

Rest of World would not and could not exist without the humans who report and tell our stories. 

We want to elevate them and their good work, and spotlight individuals who regularly contribute to our reporting.

We’ve built out a few site features to give more visibility to our contributors, like extended bylines, artist bylines, and featured authors on tag pages, but we wanted a central hub to see everyone who has ever contributed to our reporting. This is where our contributor index comes in.

The index is a place to peruse everyone who has ever contributed to a Rest of World story, in one place. We’ve ordered this page chronologically so you can easily find who you’re looking for, but we also added a useful module to the top of the page to spotlight our most recent contributors and their stories.

We love this page because it reminds us of the humans who have made — and continue to make — Rest of World an essential, trusted, and groundbreaking publication.

Looking forward to 2026

2025 was a good year for taking stock of where we are, looking at modest but lasting improvements to the website, and building for the future.

Now that we have a new audience strategy and a new publisher to chart our course, we’re looking forward to taking some bigger swings next year.

If you’ve read this far, thank you! If you have any questions, suggestions, or feedback, please don’t hesitate to contact us via email at hello@restofworld.org. 

Stay tuned for more in 2026.

Read the original story here.

Here are the highlights, and a reminder that if you have any questions, feedback or just want a chat you can shoot us an email at hello@restofworld.org

What we did 🚀

Google Preferred Source

You may (or may not) have noticed a little callout on articles that allows you to add Rest of World as a “preferred source” in Google Search. This relatively new feature allows you to save your preferred website and news sources so that they show up more consistently across Google’s Top Stories and Search functions. The idea is that it gives you control to make the search experience more relevant to you. The feature is currently only available to users in the US or India, so we’re experimenting to see what the uptake might be like. 

If you have not seen it on our site, fear not, this promo is programmed to display only to people who have US or Indian English set as their primary language in their internet browser. We’re testing two design variations of the module and measuring clicks per view conversions on them, but we expect this number to be relatively low given the relative novelty of the feature. 

As part of this release, we’ve also now extended our module display logic (we call this Subprops) to show or hide promotional units based on the browser’s language preferences. We don’t have a signed in experience, we don’t track user data and we don’t know your geo location, but we can infer user preferences based on some information provided by the browser (e.g. Chrome, Safari etc.) It’s a very fast and lightweight method of showing certain elements on our webpages. 

Our subprops system allows us to configure certain modules or promotional units to display based on the user referrer, date and time, device, the type of article the user is currently on, and now the browser language settings. It’s a powerful system that allows us to customize the user experience when we know very little about the user. Cool, eh?

Document Excerpt

We’ve extended the Quote block in WordPress to support a new type of treatment: the Document Excerpt. This came as a request from our visuals team, who were looking to highlight key pieces of text within source documents for a story. This treatment allows them to quote the source text, highlight key phrases and add a citation and source. 

It’s a relatively simple extension to our current Quote Block styles in WordPress that we hope will improve the overall reading experience. 

Donations

If you’re a regular reader, you might have seen that we’ve been pushing our Merch store and donations in the last few weeks… That’s because we’re a nonprofit organization, and we rely on the generosity of our readers to sustain our journalism. 

We ran a “personalized” promotion earlier this year, but we’ve now modified the module ever so slightly so that it displays the number of articles read by a user in the entire past year - an idea we “borrowed” from The Guardian. We store article data in local device settings, so this data is only ever visible to you on that specific device. It doesn’t cover every device you may read us on, so possibly you’ve read many more articles than what the promo tells you?! 

We always appreciate donations and we love welcoming new Rest of World members, but donating is not a possibility for you, then please consider sharing Rest of World with a friend so we can reach even more people with our journalism. 

What we learned

Mobile Masthead on articles

Last month we launched an experiment to display our site masthead downpage on articles on mobile devices. Since we launched on November 4th, masthead navigation clicks have increased by 410% compared to the previous period, and average views per visit on mobile are up by 3.6%. However, engagement rates on articles on mobile are down by 5%. At this point it looks like people are using the masthead and finding more content, but this might be slightly negatively impacting overall engagement rate on articles on mobile… It’s still quite early into this experiment so we’re going to keep monitoring.

In case you missed it

We’re offering a 20% discount on all merch store items until this Saturday 29 November. Get that Rest of World tote you always wanted!

Finally…

Please feel free to shoot us an email at hello@restofworld.org if you’ve got any ideas, questions, requests for features or feedback for us. We genuinely love hearing from you.

Read the original story here.

Whatever you're celebrating this October, please take a moment to celebrate what the Product team have been up to this past month:

What we did 🚀

AI Narrations Plugin

You may (or may not) have read that we open-sourced our AI Narrations plugin for WordPress. That means anyone using WordPress can now tap into the same functionality we use on our own site to generate the AI-powered read-throughs you see on most of our stories.

The plugin currently works only with OpenAI’s text-to-speech API, which does mean you’ll need to create an account and give them your money, but the plugin itself is completely free to use. 

If you know of a better model (cheaper, more performant, or more environmentally friendly), you can either submit a pull request to extend the functionality or raise a Github issue or request that we add support. In fact, if you have any other suggestions, or improvements to make, we’ll gladly welcome them - just drop us an email. 

Why did we open source the plugin? We have benefitted from other people's plugins in the past, and earlier this year, we set a team goal to give back to the wider journalism community by being more transparent and open-sourcing some of our own work. This is the first step in that direction and we’re learning as we go. 

Mobile Masthead on articles

We’re always looking for new ways to improve the reading experience. To that end, we’re about to introduce a sticky masthead on articles on mobile. As you scroll through a story, and into the next dynamically loaded one, you’ll have quick access to our homepage and other parts of the site through the navigation. We figured this was a good way to help anyone who might feel trapped down an infinite-scroll rabbit hole.

We’re still testing this, and have discovered an incredibly irritating bug in Safari on IOS 26 (if you have a solution please let us know) but we’re hoping to get this out imminently. 

Whether this ends up being a helpful navigation feature or a hindrance to the reading experience remains to be seen, but we’re curious to find out. We’ll be adding the masthead on mobile as an experiment for a set period and will be tracking how readers interact with it, before deciding whether to make it permanent. 

Recirculation on search and 404 pages

Can't find the story you are looking for? Landed on a page that doesn’t exist? If you’re one of the unfortunate souls who ends up in one of these digital dead ends, fear not, you can now browse our most popular stories instead.

We’ve added a Most Popular recirculation module to 404 and empty search pages, a small but effective way to help lost readers find some interesting content that others have enjoyed on site. 

Even more accessibility improvements

The battle for greater accessibility continues unabated. It's an ongoing process of small, persistent improvements and constant testing.

We use this WordPress plugin to generate alt-text for images. (I’m not plugging it, but after testing a few options, I can confirm this one’s excellent, and it’s free to use, though you’ll need to pay for OpenAI’s services.) While the plugin generates descriptive text using ChatGPT 4.0, our editorial team will review the text and check for accuracy. During a recent accessibility audit, we noticed that the generated text was often very long and the recommendation is that alt-text should not extend beyond 125 characters. 

Like any good plugin, it has hooks we can leverage, so Anna used a hook to add a prompt to keep the text under 125 characters. Now the text is descriptive yet concise, exactly what good alt text should be. If you use this plugin or are considering using it, you can see her solution here. 

What we learned

Dynamic page views

You may notice that on the majority of our articles we automatically load the next article recently published in that region. We call this our dynamic page load experience. We track page views and dynamic page views periodically, and have found that dynamic page views have accounted for 18% of our total article page views this year to date, a fairly consistent number. 

We also track what we call Engaged Page Views, these are page views where readers dwell for at least 10 seconds on the page. Engaged page views accounted for roughly 67% of our total page view number on articles this year to date. 

Topics on mobile on homepage masthead

Since we added links to our “beats” (similar to topics) to the homepage on mobile in late July, we’ve seen a 26.5% increase in clicks on the masthead on mobile devices, and on average a 72% increase in page views on beat pages on mobile compared to the previous period. This has been a pretty simple way to amplify key areas of our coverage, and help readers discover more content that’s relevant or interesting to them. 

Coming soon

We’re going to be launching our pop-up store again for a few weeks in November. We’re adding a couple of new items to the product line to tie in with the holiday and gift-giving season, so stay tuned for new merchandise from next week!

Finally…

We’re nice!

Please feel free to shoot us an email at hello@restofworld.org if you’ve got any ideas, questions, requests for features or feedback for us. We love hearing from you. 

Read the original story here.

This was never meant to be a major product. We just wanted a scalable way to serve readers who prefer listening, need screen-free access, or benefit from audio for accessibility reasons. But the feature quietly succeeded: engagement was strong, and feedback was positive.

Today, we’re releasing the AI Narration plugin as open source. It’s the exact tool we use on our site, now packaged for any WordPress publisher or blogger to install, adapt, and extend. We have benefited from the efforts of other plugin developers, and we now have an opportunity to give back.

https://github.com/row-engineering/ai-narration

To be clear, this is the plugin we actively use on our site restofworld.org. It's not some lesser version with missing features. As we find bugs or add features this will be the version that sees the changes.

Why We Built It

We already invested in high-quality audio with our Long Reads, narrated by staff, sound-designed, and distributed as a podcast. But we can’t do that for every story.

Text-to-speech (TTS) gave us a path to scale. It also gave us a way to serve readers who told us they wanted more stories to listen to.

In 2022, we tested several TTS  options but found they weren’t good enough. But by late 2023, models had improved dramatically. After testing the quality of Google, Amazon, and OpenAI voices with our team, we found OpenAI’s “Shimmer” struck the best balance: natural cadence, clarity, and speed.

Open AI’s “Shimmer” powers the plugin on our site today, but we’ve added an option for you to choose whatever voice from OpenAI you’d like for yours, straight off the bat. If you don’t want to use OpenAI’s TTS API you can extend the plugin to support a different provider of your preference. 

Why We’re Sharing It

We know small publishers face the same constraints we do: limited developer resources, tight budgets, accessibility gaps. Rather than keep this internal, we’re sharing it.

There are a lot of “maybes” to consider. Maybe it helps someone reach more readers. Maybe someone else improves it and we benefit. Maybe it sparks more open tooling in journalism tech.

Either way, it aligns with our mission and how we work, and now it's yours too.

Get started here on Github - and if you use it please let us know about your experience.

Read the original story here.

Here’s what we’ve been up to this month:

What we did 🚀

Contributor Index

This month we launched our Contributor Index. It features every single person that has authored a story for Rest of World. Our goal is to improve visibility for the journalists that make Rest of World what it is. It’s a resource for both ourselves, and for readers who are curious about the people behind our stories.

The index can be navigated alphabetically by last name, and we’ve made the navigation sticky so that you can easily move between letters. For individuals, we display their name and short biography, flagging if they are a staff member, and link to their corresponding contributor page where you can see their full biography and everything they’ve written for us.

In addition to the alphabetical index, we also followed up with a Recently Published module that features the 12 most recent authors who have published stories on Rest of World. We use horizontal scrolling so that you can peruse them all, and we feature their latest story, as well as teasing the image from the story. 

Accessibility improvements

Earlier this year we did our own internal accessibility audit that highlighted some key changes we could make. We used Chrome Lighthouse tools and the devAxe chrome plugin to audit our web pages and made a note of all of the issues highlighted in the reports. We set a goal to fix highlighted issues and finally get the all 100% green rating in Lighthouse on our standard articles. This we decided was “good enough” given our very small team. It's preferable to use screen readers and other assistive technologies and actually navigate your site experience to surface real accessibility issues for real people, which we will endeavour to do as part of our next audit. However, happy to say we at least achieved that 100 rating for now.

We achieved the score in multiple ways. Firstly we educated our editorial and visuals teams on the importance of alternative text on images, and even enabled a plugin that uses openAI’s GPT4.0 Mini API to generate descriptive alt-text to support them. We also coached our peers on the proper use of subheadings in articles and page heading semantics. In addition, we addressed some key issues with html semantics on our articles pages, ensuring that headings were in logical descending order, adding aria roles and appropriate labelling, and ensuring every element is accessible to screen readers.

Accessibility is an ongoing conversation and learning exercise, so while we certainly have a lot more to do, it’s nice to see measurable improvements on the site.

RSS Promo

We have RSS feeds for all of our latest stories, for our sections, series and regions, but we don’t actively promote them except in our footer, site navigation and platforms page. 

In an effort to make them more visible (and after some feedback in user interviews that not everyone is a newsletter fan) we’ve extended our promotional management platform (this is the platform that allows us to show and display our own promotional and recirculations units given certain criteria using a simple configuration setup) so that we can display elements on our pages given certain referrer criteria. So if someone is referred from search or certain sites we can display Related Stories, and if someone is referred from social we can display Most Popular etc. 

We’re utilizing these new changes to display our RSS feed promotion to those who visit us from HackerNews and Reddit, because readers who come from those platforms have a tendency to utilize RSS readers more so than others. 

What we learned

Merch store

We’ve had our pop-up merch store live for the last few weeks, and since then we've had visitors from the US (60%), Australia (9%), India (5%), Canada (3%) and a host of other countries. We’ve had sales from the US, Germany, Italy and Japan among others. Our most popular items have been our white mug, followed by our black tee and black tote. Our limited edition mug and socks are not selling like hot cakes in the way I anticipated - but there’s just really no accounting for taste these days…

In case you missed it

As mentioned we’ve launched a pop-up merch store! We’ll be pausing our store at the end of the month, so if you do so happen to purchase some of the most stylish socks on the market, now’s the time. 

Finally…

As we approach the last quarter of the year, we’re looking forward to developing a longer-term strategy for next year. If you’re a regular reader, we always appreciate hearing about your experience of reading Rest of World, and any feedback you have. Please feel free to shoot us an email at hello@restofworld.org if you’ve got any ideas, requests for features or feedback for us. 

Roll on decorative gourd season. 🎃

Read the original story here.

What we did 🚀

Beats page updates and trending module

We've subtly updated the layout on our Beats pages, added a trending module, and extended the latest stories section so that it seamlessly lazy-loads stories as you scroll down.

The trending module displays the most-viewed stories in that Beat and excludes the most recent stories that are featured above. We're hoping it's a helpful way of recirculating some of our readers' favorite stories from across that Beat.

What is a Beat, you ask? Great question. It's one of the key topics, subjects, or areas our journalists are focused on reporting on, and gaining expertise and authority in. Although we cover a wide range of topics, we currently have four key Beats and areas of focus that we actively prioritize as part of our coverage: China Outside China, EV Revolution, Innovation, and Tech Giants.

Beats on homepage navigation on mobile

Now that we've beefed up our Beats pages, it would be rather nice if people could find them. We've now enabled Beats navigation on mobile screens on our homepage. It's a big improvement to our mobile navigation and will hopefully help more users discover stories by the topics they're interested in.

Pull Quotes

After some careful design consideration, we've modified our pull quotes on stories. We've removed the pink underline and added a closing quote. Why, you ask? After having some time to sit with them, we realized that they didn't need pink or a pop of color to get the point across, and there was potential for them to be mistaken for hyperlinks. We're vibing with the new clean look (and we hope you like it too!).

Merch Store

We've launched a pop-up merchandise store! The items featured will be on sale for a period of just five weeks (until the end of September!) So if you'd like to nab some official and exclusive Rest of World t-shirts, totes, mugs, or socks—designed by our very own team—you can visit the store here or click on one of the promotional units we currently have dotted around the site. Get them while they're hot (and available!)

What we learned

Charts

A couple of months back we launched our Charts pages. Since then we’ve seen a 100% uptick in Charts published by our editorial team compared to the previous time period. Users have had an average engagement time of 31 seconds on these pages in the last 30 days (average engagement time on articles is roughly 1 minute, so we consider this to be pretty good for a chart specific page). Users are primarily visiting from desktop (67%), followed by mobile (33%). The highest referrer is Google at 42%, followed by direct referrals at 41%. ChatGPT, our newsletter, and LinkedIn make up the remaining referrals.

Beats

Since we've added the Beats homepage navigation to mobile on July 31, Beats page views on mobile have increased by 17% compared to the previous period—a modest increase from a previously modest number, but a positive sign that mobile users are finding our pages. Since we launched the trending module on August 7, the average engagement time on these pages has increased by 4 whole seconds. We'll take it.

In case you missed it

Our very own Chief Product Officer, Michael Donohoe, will be participating in a panel discussion at the News Product Alliance conference in Chicago this October. If you're interested in news or news product innovation, grab yourself a ticket and say hello.

Finally…

Did you know that we have an RSS feed? You can use an RSS reader or a tool like Feedly (not a plug) to subscribe to updates. And as always, if you have any questions, thoughts, or feedback for us, please don't hesitate to reach out at hello@restofworld.org (I'm watching that inbox—don't leave me hanging).

I hope you get a well-earned break this summer (or winter, depending on your hemisphere). As we roll into fall, stay tuned for further updates about our ongoing user research and the opportunity to participate. In the meantime, we're always happy to take any questions, feedback, or ideas you may have around Rest of World's product offerings.

Roll on, September. 🍂

Read the original story here.

A reminder that if you’d like to get these product updates as soon as they drop, you can subscribe to our RSS feed, and if you have any questions, thoughts or feedback for us, please don’t hesitate to reach out at hello@restofworld.org. 

What we’ve been up to 🚀

Satellite internet project

Last month we published this story that visually explores the big business of the satellite internet, comparing the market dominance of SpaceX’s Starlink in comparison to other emerging providers like Spacesail and Eutelsat OneWeb.

The story experience was designed by Joanne, our designer, in collaboration with our product, editorial and art teams, and includes a colorful, custom header that utilizes illustrations created by Studio Muti to demonstrate the crowded satellite market, as well as a custom palette and background that mirrors the night sky. 

This also happens to be the first time we’ve ever used a video scrollytelling experience in a story. Anna, developer, utilized a free JavaScript scroll trigger library in combination with our existing conveyor gallery, to implement a smooth scrolling experience that times and pairs video with text based on user’s scroll behavior. We’re excited that we now have this functionality in our box of tricks, and look forward to trying it out again with even more ambitious visual projects. 

As with many of the custom projects we do, one of the main challenges for this project was optimizing all of the video, GIFs and images to make the page speed as performant and accessible as possible. So if you read the story from Kathmandu we do hope you have as good an experience as someone viewing the story in New York. 

Charts, charts, charts

As we mentioned last month, we’ve given our charts a new home on the site. 

First we built the experience, and now we’ve plotted user journeys to them. 

In the past month we’ve launched a charts module on tag pages that displays charts related to that term, and have also introduced a new interactive promo on the homepage that showcases the latest charts that we’ve published.   

Booklist

Although this booklist template hasn’t deviated too much from previous years, we’re giving this an honorable mention as we continue to love the layout for this format, as well as the book selections this year. We often create wonderful custom experiences for new story formats, and it’s always a great feeling when our annual booklist continues to delight readers. Happy reading! 

Product data and things we learned 📈

Newsletter read time indicators

If you subscribe to our newsletter (and if you don’t, you should, it’s free!) you may have noticed that we’ve been experimenting with read time indicators (e.g. 3 mins read) on our weekly roundup of stories. Our newsletter editor, Paula, ran 3 experiments over 3 weeks where we tested links with read time indicators against our standard treatment. 

Overall the sends with the read time indicators had a marginal improvement in overall clicks, but when we dug into the stats we found that actually the read time indicators had a marginal negative impact on click-throughs on the digest section, particularly when the story was a lengthy one. Interesting! 

We’ve pressed pause on including them for the time being as we don’t want to add additional clutter, or put people off diving into more in-depth stories.

Related stories

We played around with a new simpler design for related stories, but have reverted back to the original design as the change had absolutely no impact on engagement, and the original design just looked better. ✨The more you know.   

In case you missed it 🎧

We’ve put our Long Reads series on hiatus after a great run. We ran the project as an experiment to test engagement with audio, and it’s shown that while there is definitely a small, highly-engaged listening audience, we don’t quite have the resources to continue to produce it. 

If you’re a Long Reads listener, or indeed have strong opinions about Rest of World producing a podcast, we'd love to hear from you - shoot us an email. And while we won’t be producing new episodes for the time being, you can continue to listen to our archive of episodes onsite or your favorite podcast platform. 

Finally..

Questions? Feedback? Feel free to drop a note to hello@restofworld.org, we’d love to hear from you. Enjoy the rest of July and catch you in August 🏄

Read the original story here.

Want these updates as soon as they drop? Subscribe to our RSS feed. Have any questions or thoughts? Reach out to hello@restofworld.org. Let’s go!

What we’ve been up to 🚀

Charts

We’ve silently launched an entirely new experience called Charts, that pulls all of our published embedded charts into one place for your exploration and perusal. Each chart has its own dedicated page, with an interactive chart, link to the original story and related tags. We’re also lazy-loading all of the charts on the pages, so you can continue to dive deep down the data rabbit hole. Michael wrote more about the launch in a post here. 

We’ve also rolled out a couple of ways to help regular readers discover charts on site by introducing a charts promo and a discover and share link on embedded charts on stories. We’ll soon introduce a related charts module on tag pages, and will be turning our attention to give charts a home on our homepage. Stay tuned.

Style Guide

Earlier this year we rolled out our new palettes and styles and we’ve now updated our Style Guide to reflect these new changes. The style guide acts as the source of truth in understanding what colors to apply and when, how to use our brand diacritics and logos, and what font styles to use in different contexts. Joanne has now added an additional section to cover commonly used components and their styles. It’s a very handy reference guide for all the team when trying to keep our styles consistent when building new features and components across the site. 

Lazy-load Scroll Everywhere

Anna has implemented lazy-loading page content across our beats, series, section and blog index for a seamless, scrolling experience. Previously these pages were paginated and required multiple clicks to view older content. This new lazy-loading convention worked really well on our updated tag pages and new charts pages so we’ve rolled it to other page types. Happy browsing.

Product data and things we learned 📈

Sharetools

If you’re a regular site user, you may have noticed that we’ve introduced a share tools module on articles on mobile devices. We’ve been experimenting with copy and placement over the last few weeks to see which variations drive the highest interaction levels, and ultimately decide if it’s a feature our readers will use. 

So far we’ve concluded that placing the share tools right before the first paragraph (or the lede graf as those in the journalism business might say) has had the highest click to view ratio at 0.31%. That number is still pretty low, with an average 31 out of every 1000 readers who see the module choosing to share. For now, we’ve bumped sharetools back to the further but we’re going to further explore placement higher in the story but with a different user experience. 

Newsletter subscribes

Last month we updated visual assets for our newsletter signup modules on articles and the homepage. We track on site subscribe events, and our hope was that our new assets might drive a little uptick in subscribers onsite. Interestingly, our assets appear to have had marginal impact so far, with an uptick of just 0.16% in subscribers. This is not statistically significant but I’m still stoked that they look so good!  

Beats pages

We’ve been taking a look at our Beats and Sections pages and how we can improve them. Through our analysis we’ve learned 90% of readers who visit these pages are on desktop, even though on our overall site desktop users typically make up roughly 35%. As a consequence we’re now exploring ways to help mobile readers discover these pages and browse all of our content by the topics they’re interested in. Watch this space. 

In case you missed it ✨

Lily wrote a post documenting all of her favourite, crowning projects and products at Rest of World before she finished her tenure at Rest of World. Give it a read, she’s done some marvellous things!   

Finally..

Do you have any questions or feedback for us? Anything on our site or newsletters you love or loathe? Feel free to drop a note to hello@restofworld.org with your feedback. 

‘Til next time. ✌

Read the original story here.

This is a soft launch. Actually, it’s a silent one, until now.

This week, we quietly rolled out individual pages for every one of the hundreds of charts we’ve published over the last five years. These visuals have appeared across our stories, covering everything from Meta's family of apps non-ad revenue to TikTok Shop’s rise in Southeast Asia. Some are simple bar charts. Others are deep dives into network effects, policy shifts, or economic trends. Wherever possible, they’ve included links to the underlying data.

We call it: Charts. That's just what they are.

Normally, a launch like this would be paired with callouts, promotional slots, and a proper path to discovery. Those take time and they are coming. We didn’t want to wait on what we had in place. So we flipped the switch. The archive is live. And now we’re telling you.

Why? We could prototype something like this, sure, but for us, building it outright was just as fast. Now we can see what we’ve got, understand how best to use it, and figure out how it fits into the rest of our site, and if our current plan holds up to our imagination.

Also: it’s fun.

For five years, we’ve been publishing charts at a steady, predictable pace. And then forgetting about them. They’d show up in a story, make their point, and then vanish like… well, like tears in rain.

Not anymore. Every chart now has a home. They are built in Datawrapper, interactive, link to sources when available, and can be easily shared or downloaded. Some you’ll recognize. Some you’ll be glad you missed. All are part of the visual record of our reporting.

This is also part of a broader effort to better surface and reuse the great visual work our editorial team produces. Illustrations, photography, graphics - each deserves the same attention and are on our radar.

For now, we’ll be looking for smart ways to resurface charts in future stories and pages. We hope you find some that surprise you, clarify a point, or just add to your reading experience. Feedback welcome.

Over the past month the team has been making meaningful improvements to the site experience, building out a unique storytelling experience, and learned a lot about our readers. 

Want these updates as soon as they drop? Subscribe to our RSS feed. Questions?  Reach out to hello@restofworld.org. Let’s dive in.

What we’ve been up to 🚀

Skype

We spent the better part of April building out a nostalgia-filled experience celebrating the early days of Skype and internet communication. This was a true cross-team collaboration between editorial, product, and audience, shaped by interviews with dozens of our readers. Their personal anecdotes became the heart of the project, a tribute to the early feel of digital connection. If you haven’t shared it yet, now’s the time.

Mobile Share Tools

We’ve long debated whether Share Tools are actually helpful for readers. To gather more intel we’ve rolled out a simple experiment: share tools will now appear on mobile just below the endmark of an article, and they tap into your device’s native sharing tools using the Web Share API. 

We’re running this experiment for a couple of weeks and will be testing different placements and iterations while measuring views, clicks and referral links. If you like it, we’ll keep it, and if you don’t, we won’t.

Related Terms on Tag Pages

We extended our tag pages to include related tags. These are the tags that most frequently appear on stories that also include the current tag. We surface and link 6 tags, where each have appeared on at least 10 similar stories.

This is part of our broader push to make tag pages more useful to readers, and more discoverable through search.

Latest Stories audio icon

Anna added a small audio icon to our latest stories module on the homepage, showing when a story includes a Long Reads episode or AI narration. Happy listening.

Newsletter promo asset updates

It’s been a while (nearly 3 years) since our Global newsletter sign-ups got a refresh. Our designer, Joanne, created some stunning new visuals based on current phone case trends (she did actual research!) Think bold colors, playful designs, and weekly rotations. 

Product data and things we learned 📈

Recirculation

After a month of tracking performance, we’ve found that Read More Stories and Related Stories recirculation modules have the highest level of engagement on our site, and resonate most with our readers. As a result we’ve removed Most Popular from our rotation for now. You still view what’s Most Popular and trending with our readers when you visit our homepage. 

Audio

We launched AI narrations late last year. To date we’ve found that this feature resonates most with our readers from India, with roughly 53% of listeners coming from there. 14% of listeners come from the US in second place. While only a modest number of readers use this feature, they spend nearly three times as long with us compared to the average reader.

In case you missed it ✨

Joanne wrote a wonderful post about our recent brand color refresh. If you’re curious about the thinking behind the recent changes you should give it a read. 

Finally..

Our wonderful front-end developer, Lily, is leaving us to go on to do great things at the New York Times! Since joining in 2022, Lily has been pivotal in developing so many features and projects, from video experiences, Explainers pop-ups, our custom Glossary Blocks in WordPress, building a system to manage the promos and modules across the site, as well as building out our machine translations UI. She’s also been an absolute pleasure to work with: fun, witty, charismatic, and a super-talented software engineer. Lily, we are going to miss you ♥️

Read the original story here.

🚀 Releases of Note

Tag pages get an uplift 

We’ve rolled out enhancements to our Tag pages. Tags are used to describe our stories: think person, place, thing, company. When tags are added to stories they are referenced in that article's schema markup, and eligible to be surfaced on the article text as informational tooltips called “Explainers”. Every Tag has a corresponding page, and in an effort to improve those pages and make them more useful, we’ve added a few enhancements. 

We’ve added infinite-scroll on so you can easily peruse all of the latest stories for a Tag, a Highlighted Stories section where stories are featured based on certain conditions, and a Featured Author section that automatically highlights an author who has written extensively on the subject. 

Related Stories

Across our articles we’ve introduced a new recirculation module called Related stories. It follows in the foot-steps of our Read More and Most Popular recirculation modules. It links stories based on Tags, prioritizing people and companies, and then places. We will adjust the algorithm as we learn more, and currently you’ll see it rotate between our other recirculation modules on article pages. Give it a click! 

Impact Report

We’ve published our second annual Impact Report! The report uses our new brand colors and styles. We also added a nifty little promo to the homepage. Check it out and see all of the wonderful work we did last year.

🚧 Coming soon...

We’re working on an exciting new custom editorial project with an experimental design and fun interactive elements. Sign up to our newsletter to be the first in the know when it drops!

📈 Product Stats

We’ve been experimenting with new donation callouts (we’re nonprofit and reader supported, if you didn’t know…) We’ve been measuring engagement with these callouts by tracking when the module is viewed, and when it’s clicked, and what variation of our promo was displayed. As it stands only 0.16% of views drove a click to our donation page. Our optimistic goal was to be closer to 0.5% so while a disappointing result we hope it still raised more awareness of our mission and non-profit status.

As this donation campaign comes to and end, we will be rethinking our approach for our next campaign. We will tailor our messaging so that it's more targeted and action-oriented.

🤔 Questions and Feedback

We'd love to hear more from you, our readers, about what features you like (or don’t like) on our site. We’re also always happy to talk shop on media products, frontend development and design. Feel free to drop us an email at hello@restofworld.org if you have any feedback, questions or suggestions. We’d love to hear from you. 

Until next time. 👋

Read the original story here.

🚀 Releases of Note

Homepage Showcase Improvements

The Showcase (a.k.a. Editor’s Choice) module on the homepage now includes a shuffle function to randomly display selected projects every time we publish a new homepage curation (which we publish daily!)

We’ve also introduced a pinning feature that allows us to promote projects in the first position.

Locator Map Enhancements

We’ve updated the Locator Map function to use Datawrapper's Locator Maps, providing a global view and supporting multiple markers. We use Locator Maps when a story takes place in a city or country that many of our Western readers are not familiar with.

Image Performance Upgrades

All of our images are now rendered via Fastly CDN, so we’re hoping this will improve the image performance and load speeds for our international readers. We’ve also removed our custom lazy-load function and are using browser-based lazy-loading. We'll be evaluating which approach is better in the coming weeks.

Brand Refresh Rollout

We’ve rolled out our new brand colors across all pages on the site. You’ll now see our new Cobalt blue across all of our site pages in bright mode, and dark mode.

Support Us Callout

This month we’ve launched a fundraising campaign where we are encouraging our readers to give monthly to support our independent journalism. As part of that push we’re experimenting with a new callout below our stories and informs readers on roughly how many articles they’ve read over a 3 month period. Watch your article count grow, and if you’re so inclined, consider a small monthly donation to support nonprofit journalism.

Additional Contributors can be tagged WordPress

Any existing contributors in the CMS can now be linked as Additional Contributors on a post, ensuring stories they’ve worked on appear on their Author pages.

📈 Product Stats

Some interesting things we learned in the last month...

63% of users visited us using the Chrome browser in the last 30 days. 18.6% used Safari, 8% used Firefox and 2% used Edge.

0.18% of page views were in dark mode in the last 90 days. Did you know we have dark mode? Check it out!

🤔 Questions and Feedback

We'd love to hear more from you, our readers, about what features you like (or don’t like) on our site. Feel free to drop us an email at hello@restofworld.org if you have any feedback, questions or suggestions. We’d love to hear from you. 

Catch you next month!

Read the original story here.