Geopointe announces mobile workforce management advancements in applications on Salesforce AppExchange, the world’s leading enterprise cloud market

The USA Today network is taking a page from facebook to playbook by reformatting its digital properties to give users more personalized web pages.

Since April, USA Today has tested a personalized design on its mobile site that caters to users of different content depending on whether they regularly visit the site or not, landed an article organically or through search, their location and their browsing habits. Last week, all of USA Today’s mobile web users received the new layout after it was initially only available to 25 percent of users.

Users who got the new site design spent about 45 seconds on each article they read, while users with a traditional design spent about 25 seconds on each article, said Jason Jedlinski, USA Today Network’s head of digital product. Users with the new design were also more likely to scroll completely through an article, which led them to click through its internal circulation widget at the bottom of its articles about 5 percent more often than users with the old design, according to the publisher. USA Today wouldn’t provide raw numbers and said it doesn’t track visit duration.

As people continue to flock to social media for their news and information, USA Today wanted to embrace what works on social platforms, serving content in a way that is “kind of tailored and gets smarter the more you interact with it,” Jedlinski said.

Today’s attempt to increase engagement through personalized web pages comes at a time when social platforms are taking people’s attention. Users spend more than 35 minutes a day on Facebook and YouTube, according to Mediakix. Meanwhile, most publishers are happy when users spend five or six minutes on their app a day.

Session duration is also becoming increasingly important for publishers as the great time spent on site has become associated with premium offerings. To keep users glued to their properties, publishers are experimenting with different tactics. The bleach Report got people spending more than five minutes a day in their app by entering a tab for Vine-like video loops. The scheme increased the time spent per session by 30 percent by embedding three-dimensional objects in articles. Forbes has increased its average session duration by nearly 40 percent, redesigning its mobile site to include Snapchat-like maps.

One example of how USA Today’s new web pages work is that users who rarely visit the site and link to it from search have their homepage organized by trending topics like North Korea’s missile tests and hurricane Harvey, while users who regularly visit the site get a more traditional layout organized around topics like news, sports and money. Another example: a user who regularly reads articles about the same sports team will be more likely to see articles about that particular team on the home page.

The new layout was created using a JavaScript library created by Google developers. Polymer has enabled the us today sewing team to encode elements of their web pages as individual components so that they can be reconfigured on the fly in endless combinations to suit the tastes of a particular user. Within about 90 days, a team of 10 developers and engineers spent 60-80 percent of their time launching this product, Yedlinski said. The same team then spent another four months testing and tracking its features.

In the next six months, the company plans to roll out the product to all desktop and mobile users not only for the U.S. today, but also its local newspaper affiliates like the Detroit Free press and Des Moines Register.

“Our goal is actually to build a Foundation for experimentation and for adaptive experiences that are not universal,” Jedlinski said.

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