news app design
personal project
Overview
Project :
Solo project
Duration :
2 weeks
Tools :
Adobe XD, Miro
Young adults use their phones 6 hours a day but barely touch their news apps
Millenials have high expectations for a “flawless, seamless, personalized online experience” that news organizations are not often able to provide. This “seamlessness” refers to the user experience of the app — including, for example, the desire for features such as customizable news feeds, etc.
So why aren’t younger audiences using or are interested in news apps?
This peeked my interest to find out the why and what of this problem space and how can the situation be improved for the news industry.
Design challenge
I challenged myself to learn the behavioral psychology of the millennials and figure out how they consume news and content from online sources, what interests them and how can they be enticed to actively seek news rather than letting information find them.
My Proposed Design solution
My solution is a compelling news app designed in a way that speaks to the expectations and needs of millennials and delivers them the right and adequate news/information along side addressing their habits of how they consume content online.
Proposed Features
- Explore page – scrollable stories
A customizable feed with endless scroll, feeding the news to the user as short summaries in each scroll, communicating just enough information that is needed to quickly grab knowledge about an event.
- Bookmarking stories
Saving a news story to catch up on later, bookmarking allows user to save stories that they consider as important for the time being but don’t possess to time to read through, so can get back to them later in time.
- Searching for news stories
keeping up with what’s trending and searching for diverse opinions on a particular news, topic or event in the community can help the user stay connected at all times.
My Design Process..
Deciding the Product vision and strategy
Based on the learnings from my previous projects, I though of giving this project a more settled start by deciding on the product vision and strategy. I tried answering questions that addressed the “What”, “Why” and “How” of this product, which helped me grasp the overall goal in a more focused manner and set realistic and concrete expectations.
Product research
User research
diving in to tap the user base..,
For user research, I decided on interviewing millennials that could serve me a variety of content and insights with reduced replication, hence I funneled on 4 of my batchmates who hail from different backgrounds and approaches when it comes to consuming news and info online, or consuming news at all.
Affinity mapping
Upon analysing the conversations I had with the 4 interviewees, I tried to recognize similar patterns and habits. This helped me classify the information into 2 personas that guided me further in the process.
Persona 1 : active news seeker
Persona 2 : trend follower
Market research and competitive analysis
I did a secondary research to identify traits and features of the existing popular news apps. I analyzed few direct competetors such as inshorts (a news app that is already appels to handsome amount of millennials), and studied the design psychology put behind some of the popular social media apps that enticed and satisfied the millennials, such as tiktok and instagram.
Inshorts(news app) analysis
Social media news focused analysis
Ideation
brainstormed ideas through provocative actions…
Once I had accimilated all the information, I ideated a myriad of design solutions for the app, the features and UI of the product. While I had devised a handful of ideas, I certainly knew not each one of them belonged in the product.
So, I began writing job/situation stories to decide on the features , and user stories for each of the ideas to avoid feature creep, justifying the necessity of each feature I decided on. and.
Sketching and paper wireframing
I designed tested a few drafts, with the users. After two failed drafts, the final draft did well in the user testing and the outcome were the following designs.
Working on the final designs
high fidelity prototypes for the finalized proposed features
Exploring Stories :
A customizable feed with endless scroll, feeding the news to the user as short summaries in each scroll, communicating just enough information that is needed to quickly grab knowledge about an event.
Bookmarking Stories :
Saving a news story to catch up on later, bookmarking allows user to save stories that they consider as important for the time being but don’t possess to time to read through, so can get back to them later in time.
News Search :
keeping up with what’s trending and searching for diverse opinions on a particular news, topic or event in the community can help the user stay connected at all times.
User Testing and Results
Upon anticipation, I tested these designs with the same users I had interviewed, and received better response than earlier, user flow as expected, and better intuitiveness as quoted by the users.
Drafts that didn’t make it
drafts that got rejected in user tests helped me better my product…
Key Learnings and Challenges
Millenials are a generation with behaviours that are hard to crack/dissect. While there are a myriad of news apps out in the market, what makes one stand out is how often does its user actively and positively convert.
This project that I worked on, gave me an opportunity to challenge myself in a new domain, and test my abilities more. Being a part of the user base myself, how to differente my own values and assumptions from affecting the product was a constant battle.
I understand and believe this is just a basic solution and has immense room for improvement in all aspects. I actively look forward to contributing more on solving such purpose-driven problems in the future.
Thanks for reading!
