understanding context

2019 Key Media trends: why design a news app?

• Declined Readership: With newer and more immediate ways to get news, the disconnect between newspapers and consumers deepened.

• Print vs. Digital: Global digital revenue continues to grow worldwide, yet print still makes up nearly 90 percent of publishers’ overall revenue.

• News Trust Crisis: Element of authentic communication are needed for trust to exist between the news producer and the reader.

Through context research, we noticed that newspaper readership has been declining for both physical and digital newspaper market (see charts below). In order to find out possible reasons behind this phenomenon, we created specific research strategies to find out more facts.

GATHERING INFORMATION

Key questions

Our user research is going to focus on finding answers for the following three questions:

1. What is missing from today’s news media?

2. In what format do people want to see news presented?

3. How should people interact with news?

Conduct user research

We wrote a 90-minute Discussion Guide Draft to be used in conducting research to each participant (an interview, an observation exercise, and a projective exercise). We selected nine participants, and set up meeting times with them.

Participants Screening Criteria:

1. No participation in focus group in the past 6 months (to avoid any biased from previous research).

2. Not employed in Media and Communication industry or in market research (to avoid any biased perspective).

3. All participants are at least 21 years old (above 21 for a more mature and consistent perspective).

4. All participants falls in the category of Millennial (age group 21-40) (to ensure the research data best represent the need of future generation).

5. Must be fluent in English (the research and interview will be conducted in English).

These interviews helped us gather a lot of findings to further analyse user needs, and brainstorm our product idea.

ANALYTICs

Structuring data into frameworks: 2 x 2 Diagram Venn Diagram. We organized data into two frameworks, then synthesized the data in the frameworks and highlighted the opportunity within each framework.

The synthesized data and highlighted opportunities in the new frameworks helped us generate new ideas, for example:

• Connect local news App with other App to increase readership.

• Add news abstract or content summary to assist ease of reading.

• Make reading news more enjoyable through incorporating other media (music, animation, etc.)

At the end of this phase, we combined all ideas into one strongest idea and then develop storyboards based on it.

PROBLEM STATEMENT

How might we make reading news a more enjoyable experience?

ideation

Brainstorm ideas

We amassed over 30 solutions in one week, which we then rated, organized, and eliminated to one core idea.

PRODUCT strategy: What is News melody?

VISION

The product is envisioning that reading news can be as enjoyable as listening to music, so people can read more news and care more about the world outside of their own bubble.

SPECIALTY

News Melody brings the functions of standard news app and music app together, and creating another layer of emotional incentives to user experience. News and musics are matched by AI, as a result readers are encouraged to click into news that they might not be interested in.

user hIErarchy: Who will use news Melody?

Based off user research, we listed out three user groups and their hierarchy in terms of using News Melody. Our users include students, young professionals and news lovers, as listed below:

USER JOURNEYS & Storyboards: how user interact with News melody?

We asked ourselves two questions:

• How will our product - News Melody improve user’s life?

• How will the user navigate within News Melody?

To answer these questions, we diagrammed a user’s journey and drew a set of storyboards to clearly illustrate user experience.

design

The product research and ideation part was done in a group of three, while the design and development part is an individual effort done by myself.

design criteria

content architecture

Apart from the main navigation through latest, local and global news, I believe that news on News Melody should be shareable and collect-able, as a result, I designed a news album for users to collect and share news to their friends.

Live News feature makes news accessible through media other than text and images, which is more adapted for mobility.

Customized reading experience is provided by News Melody. Users can adjust the percentage of text, image and advertisement in their news pages.

Screens

Ongoing…

I will keep developing screens and prototype of News Melody.