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The Customer
Portfolio Management Research (PMR), a With Intelligence product, publishes 13 highly respected journals serving the global investment community. They have been hosted on the HighWire platform since 2020, providing PMR with a cutting-edge feature set, and powerful discovery tools.
The Challenge
PMR works closely with HighWire to support the ever-changing needs of their users, and highlighted emerging opportunities to improve user engagement through personalization. The existing homepage already had several features to help promote key content. However, with diverse topics and growing volumes of articles – now over ten thousand – it became even more important to help users discover content relevant to their interests, and which surfaces trends in the wider community.
Solution
In collaboration with PMR, HighWire designed three additional features:
- Recommended for You – personalized articles based on users’ behavior
- What’s Popular – the most viewed content across all journals
- Latest Issues – a quick view of the most recently published issues
These updates created an experience where the user can immediately see content which is tailored to their interests or popular among their peers, all within a one-stop-shop homepage. Reducing the time it takes to search, allowing them to spend more time engaging with the core research content.
The algorithms used to identify relevant content for each user were refined over several iterations, taking into account variables such as whether a user had visited an earlier version of an article, and what they’ve previously engaged with.
Redefining the Homepage
For a better user experience, PMR wanted to enhance user engagement, content discovery, and personalization. They wanted to customize the homepage that could highlight trending articles, show the latest issues, and make personalized recommendations-based readers’ choice.
Together with PMR, we introduced three new content sections to the homepage:
- Recommended for You – personalized articles based on user behavior
- What’s Popular – the most viewed content across all journals
- Latest Issues – a quick view of the most recently published issues
These sections make the homepage feel fresh, timely, and tailored to each reader.
Updated Sections
What’s Popular
A live-updating carousel shows the 10 most-read articles across all 13 journals. We built an API to pull real-time engagement data—views, clicks, etc.—and highlight content that’s resonating with readers right now.
Each article card includes:
- Title
- Author(s)
- Journal name
- Volume and issue details
It’s a quick way for users to discover what’s popular amongst their peers.
Latest Issues
This section features the 5 most recently published journal issues. Each entry includes a cover image that links directly to the issue, encouraging readers to explore the newest content across PMR .
Recommended for You
This is the part where we’ve added personalization. We track the last 10 topics (or subject areas) a user interacts with and calculate a score based on how often and how deeply they engage with each one. Then we:
- Turn those scores into weighted content slots
- Select 9 new articles from those topics (not previously read)
- Prioritize recent publications
If someone’s brand new or hasn’t engaged yet, we show one fresh article from each journal. If there’s truly no data to work with, we simply hide the section.
We also built in smart filters—for example, if a user has already read the pre-press version of an article, we won’t show them the published version again.
Our Execution
HighWire built the back-end logic, APIs, and personalization engine, working closely with the PMR team to fine-tune the design and functionality. We focused on:
- Data aggregation across all journals
- Clean, user-friendly front-end design
- Logic that adapts to each user’s reading behavior
We tested everything thoroughly and rolled out the changes with minimal disruption.