The Philadelphia Inquirer's New Widgets Are Taking Reader Experience to Another Level

The Philadelphia Inquirer, one of the leading news organizations in the city, recently introduced innovative lock screen widgets that have significantly enhanced the reader experience. These widgets, developed by the Inquirer's app team, leverage Apple's new lock screen functionality to provide live updates and visualizations during important events such as elections and sporting events.

The Inquirer's lead app developer Chris Tibbs had the idea to utilize Apple's lock screen functionality for the 100th mayoral primary in Philadelphia. Building on their previous experience with a Super Bowl widget, the team developed and tested the widget during the Philadelphia Phillies season, both to see if the app would work for a smaller audience and to test the widget’s reach. 

“We started from really humble beginnings (serving updates off of my MacBook) but now it’s a full-fledged server that handled both the election and a regular season Phillies game on the same night,” Tibbs said in an email to the Nieman Lab.

The Inquirer's interactive team, already working with the Associated Press for desktop and mobile election updates, contributed to the development of the lock screen widget for the mayoral race. Lindsay Deutsch, the product manager for reader experience at the time, explained that, in order to adapt the original formula for elections, they needed to follow “a vision for how they [the app’s interactives team] wanted to represent vote counts throughout the evening,” and then “adapted that vision to fit the capabilities iOS provides.”

To attract new users and encourage them to follow the election results coverage, the Inquirer implemented a strategy within the App Store. In the two weeks leading up to the election, users searching for the Inquirer or related keywords were prompted to follow the election results. 

“At 8 p.m. on Election Day, once the polls closed, the widget was triggered on users with iOS 16.1 or higher upon opening the app. This happened whether a user tapped on a push alert to an article, or organically opened the Inquirer app to scroll headlines,” Deutsch said, adding: 

“Once activated by opening the app, users saw a dynamic island feature that highlighted the two frontrunners while closed. When pressed or held open, a bar graph appeared to visualize votes being reported (also serving users an Apple-standard prompt to opt in or out of the feature). As the race progressed and the bar graph units became substantial, the view changed, uncovering cut-outs of candidates’ heads (in this case, just eventual winner Cherelle Parker) and ultimately noting the winner.”

The lock screen widgets position the Inquirer as the go-to “second-screen” experience for readers. During live events, especially in the sports space where the Inquirer has already introduced features like Gameday Central, users spend a substantial amount of time on their phones–not just checking the score for the game, but even while in attendance to the games. 

Finally, the Inquirer, above all, puts its love for Philadelphia first. 

“At the Inquirer, our north star is ‘Always Philly,’ and that extends to our product work,” Deutsch added. “We believe strongly that the best way to serve the needs of those in Philly and the region is by reaching them where they are, which is often on their phones, and by providing an enhanced experience in the app and natively on the phone for both subscribers and casual users.” 

Given the success of these new widgets, the Inquirer is on a good path to keep their client base engaged.