The chicken, the egg and the Quartz home page

Joseph Lichterman of the Nieman Journalism Lab writes about the Quartz redesign that includes a home page for the first time.

Lichterman writes, “Pre-redesign, 90 percent of visitors to Quartz’s website arrived through article pages, with just 10 percent coming through the qz.com front door. Part of that is Quartz’s focus on social distribution of its stories, the idea that every story starts with an audience of zero. But Seward said it’s also a chicken-and-egg scenario: ‘If you don’t build a homepage for people to go to, they’re not going to come to it.’

“Any news site aims to build up user loyalty. For most, that means return visits to the homepage, but Quartz found an unusual route to habit-building through its daily email, which gets open rates north of 40 percent. The new homepage approach merges the two. Quartz doesn’t expect the shift to significantly change the percentage of visits that start on the homepage; rather, Seward said the site hopes to grow overall audience while creating an experience that will encourage users to stay longer on Quartz.

“‘The intended use of [The Brief] is loyal return visits. We need to gauge whether we see that happening at all, and then at what frequency.’ Seward said. ‘The frequency is less about measuring the success of it — frankly, I actually think we don’t know yet. It’s so new, and there aren’t enough analogous products out there to really tell if we should be expecting people to just be twitchy and checking it all the time, or if they have one time in their day when they check it and it’s just that once a day. That’ll inform what we should be doing with the writing of the briefs in the first place.’

“The Brief also takes a cue from Glass, a subsite Seward launched earlier this year that focuses on television. Headlines on Glass are presented in an outline format where users can click on them to get more information or added context that drops down. Quartz has taken the same approach on the Brief, with arrows you can click on to get more information about some stories.”

Read more here.