Overview
Final project for UX bootcamp. Assignment was to use the design-thinking process to craft a solution for a problem that my team identified.
My Responsibilities
Craft user interview questions
Facilitate group-thinking exercises (customer journey mapping, empathy map) to frame problem statement
Wireframe key screens
Conduct user testing on early prototypes
The Problem Space
Recently, publication and the spread of information have evolved - or some may even claim - revolutionized. Technology has disrupted the ways we obtain, consume, and produce news. For the first time in history, information is no longer centralized; rather, it has been democratized. We are now both consumer and author.
This change in media has occurred so rapidly and at such a large scale we have yet to regulate it, giving way to information of varying quality — sometimes falsified, misleading, and even malicious news, which we believe people come into contact with largely through social media. To understand the implications of this issue and how it affects consumers, we interviewed approximately 20 individuals about their social media usage, news consumption habits, and how they define quality information.
User Interviews
“There's so much information out there it's not easy to know what's true and what's not true--it can be hard to draw a conclusion.”
“Sometimes I see something on my Facebook feed that I click on, and I'm not sure if what I'm reading is true or not. There's no way of knowing.”
“If different sources say the same thing then it's more likely to be true. But I don't have the time to look for different sources.”
What we realized was that when it comes to social media, many individuals obtain news indirectly; that is, they don’t seek the information, they simply come across it. More avid consumers rely on other outlets for their news intake. With this in mind, we decided to broaden our focus to include news consumption outside of social media. By expanding our investigation, we were able to hone in on a problem.
Meet Petro
Pedro is a curious and social individual. He enjoys discussing current affairs and believes that being informed is a duty of the modern citizen; for Pedro, the basis of progress lies in continuous learning.
Pedro is a busy man, although he always makes time to browse the internet for news to consume. His distrust of certain media types, however, results in his investing a considerable amount of time browsing. Pedro would like to optimize his time; that is, invest time obtaining quality content so he can devote his attention to what he is reading rather than the reliability of the sources.
Pedro is interested in topics related to science, technology and branding, but his greatest weakness is sports.
User empathy map
Customer journey mapping
SO?
How might we provide Pedro access to various sources of verified information to eliminate his doubt and maximize his time spent consuming quality news?
Designing the Experience
Sitemap
First, we evaluated potential solutions and voted on our favorites. Then, we came up with a list of features and organized them by function within a sitemap
Sketches
We then moved on to drawing some quick paper wireframes of our most important screens
After sketching out our ideas, we held small focus groups for feedback followed by more iterations. After several rounds of preliminary user testing to ensure the user flow and information architecture were intuitive, we began designing our prototype in Sketch.
Final Design
