We at Road to VR have been asking ourselves: how do we offer the most value to our readers? That question led to an experiment over the last few months that changed the way we structured each article, with the goal of making them more useful to you. Now, we’d like to hear your thoughts.
From the very beginning of Road to VR, our goal has always been to give the audience enough context in any given article that they would walk away understanding both the what and the why it matters of each piece of news we cover. Between my colleague Scott and I—who produce the vast majority of content on Road to VR—there’s nearly 26 years of collective expertise in the XR. That’s why, for most of our publication’s existence, our usual news articles generally wove critical context directly inline with each and every paragraph of the news subject of the article. Usually that resulted in several pretty dense paragraphs.
In recent months we decided to experiment with another idea: to more clearly separate the what (ie: the basic facts of the news that you could find from the official source) from the why (ie: why does this news matter… through the lens of authors that deeply understand the subject matter and historical context of the XR industry).
So you may have noticed recent articles organized with two recurring headers: ‘The News’ and ‘My Take’.
In ‘The News’, we aim to give you the facts quickly and without fluff. In ‘My Take’, we aim to zoom out and help readers understand why this particular news item matters in a broader context. This section also allows Scott and I to speak from a personal “I” perspective—and lean into our individual expertise, opinions, and personality—rather than speak with a collective voice, as we have done historically.
Here are two examples of an examples of articles using this new format:
So, we’d really like to hear your thoughts on this format. A couple of questions to think about: did you notice it? Do you like or dislike it? Is there some way it could be better?
Please feel free to leave a comment below, or if you’d like to offer your feedback privately, please reach us at feedback [at] [dot] com.
