Follow is a new set of features that bring user-driven curation to Pugpig Bolt. It's a brand new UI that leverages and expands on much of our existing dynamic timeline functionality, giving users a intuitive and powerful way to customise their app experience.

It's one of biggest features we've added to Bolt in some time, and we're thrilled to get into your users' hands.

What is Follow?

The core of the experience is a new tab which users curate by following their favourite authors, topics, or any other taxonomy you may have set up. 

Authors and topics (or sections/subsections) might be the most common use case for news publishers, but for instance you could have things like regions, sports teams; or types of recipes or workouts in apps offering such utilities. 

When we talk about Follow we're really talking about a bunch of different features which make it up - see below for more on this - covering the whole user experience of finding things to follow, managing what is followed, reading followed content etc.

Follow is available now for Bolt iOS and Android, and has an extensive roadmap of future improvements, expansions and integrations. It will be added to Bolt Web in the coming months.

Terms

Terms are the atom of Follow. These are the actual things a user follows and come directly from the taxonomies mentioned above. Examples would be UK Politics, Baltimore Ravens or a specific author.

The Follow tab

The Follow tab is the home of this new feature-set. It's where a user will initially be introduced to the various things they can follow and where they'll subsequently go to view their personalised feed. 

For our first iteration, this feed is a reverse-chronological list of content from every term they're following. This means they'll always be seeing the latest content on their interests, which might differ a fair amount from your more editorially-curated timelines elsewhere. As part of our roadmap, we're looking at further ways you or your users can display or break down this content.

The actual cards in the Follow timeline are not limited solely to articles, any content belonging to that term will appear, including video and article cards. These cards will inherit all of your standard card styling, but not (currently) any card layout information you're sending us from the feed. 

The Follow tab can also be the home of your saved timeline, this will appear as a second timeline in that tab. This gives the user a cohesive home for their content choices.

Term picker 

So, how do users actually follow things? There are two main ways: the term picker and term cards. The term picker is a new UI that enables users to quickly and easy see what they can follow, choose as many as they like and populate their Follow timeline accordingly.

If a user isn't following anything, the term picker will be displayed in place of the Follow timeline, this will often be a user's first entry point to the feature, and should allow them to swiftly get to grips with it and start personalising.

Of course, users may also wish to add or remove things from what they're following. To handle this, the term picker is available as a deeplink which can be accessed from anywhere in the app. We'd suggest always having it in the toolbar of the Follow tab, allowing easy customisation right there and then, as well as in settings, which provides a natural home for users looking to manage their choices.

The term picker offers our usual customisation capabilities (fonts, colours, copy) but cannot currently be further customised with CSS or replaced with a custom solution.

The order in which terms are displayed depends on two things. Firstly, terms are placed into one of 3 buckets

1. Featured: These will appear first, the first 50 of these terms will appear before the “Show more” button.
2. Normal: These will appear after featured terms, after 5 terms the remainder will be shown after tapping “show more”
3. Hidden: These will not appear in the term picker

These can be set in the feed you send us, as detailed in our JSON feed spec, or manually in Express.

Terms are ordered within these buckets by the number of items in them, i.e terms with more content appear ahead of those with less. We're looking at further options here, such as alphabetical ordering or via a rank set in your content feeds.

Term cards

Term cards are a feature not specific to Follow, but offer another way for users to add topics or authors to their list. When Follow is enabled any term cards will have a new “Follow” button on them. 

You can read more about term cards here. We encourage the use of this feature for anybody with dynamic timelines, but Follow helps take it to the next level.

Paywalling

We know that our customers will have different approaches to how non-subscribers interact with this feature, depending on their thoughts on funnels, discoverability and metering. As such we provide 3 points at which it can be paywalled. It's important to point out that Follow in no way changes the availability of your content, articles will still require the same level of access as if they were found from other sources.

1. Paywalled tab and term picker: The user will see the follow-specific paywall when they visit the term picker, either by going to it directly or by going to the follow tab. This is strongest form of paywalling.
2. At the point of following: In this case a user will see the term picker and follow buttons on term cards, but tapping “Follow” on either will invoke the paywall. This allows a user to see more of the feature and understand why they're being asked to sign in, register or subscribe.
3. At the content level: This is essentially the default behaviour, a user can interact with the term picker, follow things from term cards and see their curated follow timeline. They're then subject to usual paywalling rules of your content. This is good for customers with a mix of free and paid content, metering or a desire for users to get more to grips with the feature before committing.

Analytics 

There are both event and user-level elements to the tracking of this feature. These are detailed in our analytics specification but at a high-level include:

Events

1. Following or unfollowing a term or terms
2. Saving changes in the term picker
3. Screenviews of the follow tab or term picker

User

1. A list of all the terms a user is currently following

What we need from you

There are several things required from you, from a planning and technical perspective.

At a high-level we need to know:

1. The location of the Follow tab, we recommend it being a tab of its own, but it can be a hidden tab accessible from anywhere. Note that we've added the ability to include the saved timeline in the Follow tab, so that space is an option to be freed up. We'll also need the name and icon for this tab.
2. The taxonomies you want to use and their user-facing names (e.g topics and authors)
3. How you plan to decide which terms are featured/hidden etc.
4. If you're not yet using term cards, we need to know what metadata you're able to send us in your feed (Headshots, bios, etc)
5. How you'd like the feature paywalled

Future plans

There are exciting plans in the pipeline to further enhance Follow and add a greater degree of customisation to the experience - some of these are referenced in the doc above. We're monitoring feedback and analytics as we roll out more customers. We have big dreams for Follow and the future of personalisation on Bolt. Stay tuned and we'll keep you abreast of where we're going.