Roles: Lead UX/UI Designer and Researcher
Toolkit: User interviews, comparative and competitive analysis, lo-fi wireframes, hi-fi prototype, and usability testing.
Deliverable: Zeplin hand-off of v2.0
Overview
As local newsrooms across the country shrink, Spotlight aims to offer accessible, quality articles.
Over 160 million people in the U.S. still read news on a regular basis. Yet, these readers are affected by the need for increasingly costly individual print, digital subscriptions, or ever more annoying ads interlaced with news. To meet the growing unfulfilled demand for quality online access to local news, Spotlight is to be a dominant local news distributor that provides a user-friendly reading experience across multiple publications and is free of paywalls and rich in local news content.
Defining Goals
Make finding local news easy.
To simplify the navigation and organization of articles in the already-live application, I evaluated the live app and created mock user goals to explore possible solutions:
Help me find relevant news quickly
How might we organize articles and publishers to offer a pleasant browsing experience?Help navigate through the app
How might we offer more affordance and visual cues to help users?
Research
How do you read news?
Over the course of roughly three weeks, I conducted primary research with college students in order to understand their current engagement with the local news and how this news consumption process could either be improved, or, encouraged further.
Semi-Structured Interviews
I conducted semi-structured interviews with four Penn State students that identified as either “avid news readers” or “non-news readers.” Avid news-reading individuals describe themselves as being engaged in either print or televised news, whereas individuals who don’t consume news actively describe themselves as being uninterested in the news and generally lack the motivation to stay abreast of political happenings. A number of questions regarding their news consumption practices were asked, including:
What is something difficult about following local news for you? What would make this process easier?
Do you feel motivated to follow any news?
What are your preferred sources of news?
How often, and with what frequency, do you follow local news?
Findings & Synthesis
Although most participants don’t usually actively consume local news, the avid news readers would rely on the campus paper to report interesting articles about the surrounding area.
The most common source of news is word-of-mouth and Twitter.
Because local news is not part of the participants’ major feeds of information, it takes a conscious effort to find local news.
“People get news from their friends now. There really isn’t enough time for me to follow most national or international news. Let alone local news. ”
The Solution
Categorize articles, mimic print reading experience, an exploratory experience.
Our research confirmed readers value a one-stop app that offers multiple sources of local news. However, the product would be even more desirable if it offers both article-oriented and publisher-oriented modes of reading.