Expensive trips around the world, on your dime | Morning Newsletter

The investment staff at Pennsylvania’s largest pension fund have run up big travel bills — including to Hong Kong, Sydney, San Francisco, and Zurich. Before the pandemic kept everyone at home, staff at PSERS, the retirement plan for Pennsylvania teachers and school employees, spent more than $1.5 million on travel over three years. My colleague Craig McCoy breaks down the most expensive trips, and what the fund plans to do about it.

And this week, you may have noticed that Inquirer.com looks a little different. We have a brand new home page design, and I spoke with two of my colleagues who did a lot of work to make it happen. Jessica Parks, director of news products and projects, and Kat Sheplavy, senior product manager, explain how reader feedback affected the design and the challenges involved in the switch a little later in this newsletter.

— Lauren Aguirre (@laurencaguirre, morningnewsletter@inquirer.com)

Each week, we go behind the scenes with one of our reporters or editors to discuss their work and the challenges they face along the way. This week we chat with Director of News Products & Projects Jessica Parks and Product Manager for Reader Experience Kat Sheplavy about Inquirer.com’s new website design, why the change was needed and what you can expect from our new homepage.

Can you describe your job?

Jessica Parks: Our product is journalism, whether it’s on our website, app, newsletters, or live events. The reporting process is complex, and then it gets customized for each platform. The Product Department’s job is to make everything look simple and inviting to readers, and my job is to make it easier for the newsroom to accomplish. I talk a lot about editorial standards, transparency, user experience, preventing errors, and the best ways to present different stories.

Kat Sheplavy: As Product Manager for Reader Experience, my job is to make Inquirer.com as easy as possible for our audience to use and engage with. First impressions mean a lot, so I spend a lot of time working with departments across the company (including the newsroom, design, engineering, marketing, sales, customer service, and finance) to make sure that they are thinking about the reader experience first when making decisions.

Why did The Inquirer decide to change up the look of its website?

JP: Our old site reflected our old ways of covering the news. People found it chaotic, dense, daunting. We wanted to make it easier to surface the right stories to the right readers at the right times, rather than hoping you stumble upon an investigation when you have the time to read it, or expecting you to hunt for headlines in a maze of sections. We built in more flexibility for editorial curation, and the foundations of a more personalized user experience.

Which new part or feature are you most excited to see finally launched to everyone?

KS: This redesign has been in the works for over a year now, it has been really exciting to see it all come to life. I am most excited about the future possibilities. This new design introduces a lot more flexibility, which will allow us to quickly iterate and improve on the experience so that we can better serve our audience.

We collected a lot of feedback on Inquirer.com’s new look. How did that help inform the design process?

KS: There are several forums we use to ensure that decisions we make are being influenced by the needs of our audience. We conduct one-on-one interviews with our audience to better understand how local news and information fits into their daily lives, and try to identify trends that help us understand opportunities to improve our products and services to better fit into their routines. When we are designing new products or features, we will also survey our audience to ensure that these features make sense and are easy to use before we hand them off to the development team to build. After we launch a new feature, we will ask for feedback from our audience in the form of surveys, which we then use to identify issues that are causing usability problems and identify opportunities for improvement.

What has been the most challenging and the most rewarding part of this transition?

JP: The biggest challenge is patience. We have so many plans just waiting to be built, and I wish we could have all of them in our toolbox, right now! The biggest reward is getting 🤩 feedback from readers, especially when what you describe is exactly what we were aiming for. 😭🙏

Email Jessica Parks at JParks@inquirer.com and email Kat Sheplavy at KSheplavy@inquirer.com.

This is such a gorgeous shot of cherry blossoms in Philly. Thanks for sharing, @brittboas! And if you want to get out and see them for yourself, here’s a guide for finding blooms in the city.

Tag your Instagram posts or tweets with #OurPhilly and we’ll pick our favorite each day to feature in this newsletter and give you a shout-out!

If you need to get your mind off of the pandemic, you can shift it to something else sweeping the state: spotted lanternflies. Your mission is pretty simple: Find and kill the invasive species’ eggs. This species is an invasive plant-hopper native to China, Bangladesh, and Vietnam, but lanternflies are sap-sucking monsters that can easily wipe out entire crops. So it’s best to get to their eggs before they hatch and spread even farther.

Here’s how to identify and kill lanternflies.

What’s the best harmless prank you’ve pulled or had pulled on you? Because April Fools’ Day was last Thursday, we asked our Instagram followers about the best harmless pranks they’ve experienced. Here’s what a few of them said:

🧂”Switched the sugar and the salt.”

🤔 “Placing tiny pictures of Danny Devito’s face all over my high school.”

🔴 “Put a red super ball in my Dad’s salad and he thought it was a cherry tomato 🤣”

👟 “Hid all of my dad’s shoes. He had to bring his dad to the hospital & only had slippers 😬”

Follow us at @PhillyInquirer on Instagram so you can participate when we ask a new question.

People came from near and far to watch some of the 250 resident bald eagles near the Conowingo Dam in Maryland on the Susquehanna River. Check out more photos here.