“Millenial News Network” or MNN is the largest syndicate of breaking news and other news worldwide. They are only focused on the millennial audience. They are trying to understand how millennials consume and share content.
MNN doesn’t want to be dogmatic about “how they’ve always done things.” They want to break new ground, take a few risks, and they’re counting on us to bring change to the industry. Our assignment was to conduct research and find a way to give millennials what they want when searching and reading the news.
We were assigned to design a compelling news source for today's generation, rethink the news experience via mobile app.
Design Process
Empathy ▪ Define ▪ Ideate ▪ Prototype ▪ Test
Over 120 people were involved with helping us complete this project! From data collection through surveys, personal interviews, many others helped with low mockup testing and high fidelity prototyping. Thank you to everyone who contributed!
Empathy ✓
Our first step was to research and conduct interviews. In order for us to do this, we needed to create interview questions based off assumptions that we already had in mind. Keep in mind the millennial generation is defined as someone born between 1980-2000.
Our assumptions:
Most millennials don’t proactively search news sites
Most millennials use mobile devices for accessing news
Most millennials get their news from social media platforms such as Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, Google News, Apple News, Buzzfeed, The Chive, podcasts, or radio
Based off these assumptions, our team created interview questions and a Google survey that the 4 of us shared over Facebook and social media.
Over two weeks we received over 80 survey results, conducted 20 personal interviews, and received some amazing feedback.
A sample of some of our interview questions:
What is breaking news to you?
How concerned are you with the news being true/valid/unbiased?
How important is it to be entertained with the news you read?
Where do you get the news and why that specific source?
Do you read the news? If so, how often are you reading the news? If not, why not?
What topics do you focus on?
What do you consider worldwide news?
Do you share the news with others(friends/family)? If so, how and when do you share this news?
Do they proactively search for news? If so, what sources do you use?
Does the news usually leave you feeling positive or negative after you’ve finished reading?
What is your preferred style of news? (text, video, mix of both)
Define ✓
We had assumptions and speculations that millennials didn't care as much about the news or rarely read about it. This turned out to be false. From the data we collected, most of our responses said they either view the news multiple times per day or at least daily.
How often do you read the news?
Although we were wrong with how often millennials cared about the news, we were somewhat accurate with our assumption that Facebook would be the #1 way millennials consume their news, followed by Google News, Apple News, as well as radio and podcasts.
What is your preferred method of news?
To further break down all of our data and research we had collected, we used a software called unbird. This gave us a free text analysis and helped us break down the problem we were going to solve. From all of our interviews conducted, we wanted to identify the word that was used the most and see if we could create something that would help solve that specific problem. The words balanced and unbiased were two key words that stuck out.
Ideate ✓
From our interviews, a constant response we received was that news was depressing or caused feelings of depression. We took this into consideration as one of the problems we wanted to solve. We threw out ideas of having some type of filter, slider bar, or some other way to specify what type of news users wanted to view. However, we decided this wasn't the main problem we wanted to solve and erased the board.
The only way of validating potential fake news or one sided news is to Google search. There isn't a simple way to validate the truthfulness of a news article. This was exactly the problem we were wanting to solve because it tied directly in with our data and how millennials want balanced, easy, trustworthy, interesting, and unbiased news.
So here we redefined our problem that needed to be solved. When Sarah access news, she wants to see multiple viewpoints so she can have balanced opinions and make wise decisions. With this we were going to tie in easy, balanced, and interesting.
Some of the main ideas being tossed around were to include a home page for the user to find us (although this was an app), main dashboard of news that was selected by the user and had some customization, and a flip it icon that flipped the news to different news sources that could validate or oppose popular news articles.
Prototype ✓
Collectively as a group, we decided to follow Google Material Design and their guidelines for designing our high fidelity mockup. This was especially helpful for keeping us organized with fonts, font sizes, colors, buttons, menu, etc. and allowed us to design separately. I played a key role in creating everything in high fidelity and what is shown below.
Our color scheme we decided on:
Here is our first high fidelity piece that I personally built in Sketch.
Jumping straight into our app, we wanted to use artificial intelligence and collect data from our user right at the get-go so the app knows what type of news to display on the dashboard. The user selects the news source and the color changes from light grey to green. We also added a clickable "I'll do this later..." so the user can skip ahead.
Next step was to collect more data and be able to give the user our minimal viable product through their selection of what is interesting to them. Keep in mind our problem we are trying to solve is making news balanced, unbiased, true, trustworthy, and interesting. These are more pieces I built in Sketch.
The app takes a second to collect the data received and then organizes the users priorities and displays them onto the next screen which is the dashboard.
I created this dashboard and menu in Sketch following Google Material design.
Here the user is introduced to the main dashboard. I used a strong bright green to show the Flip It button which first brings curiosity to the user of what it does, and second, completely changes the way the user views their news.
Making news interesting was a challenge. With this Flip It button, the user can make their news go from a white background with defined titles, and a more chronological design, to a dark background, which brings their news blended together.
Using Google Material Design, I created a drawer menu that slides from the left. It displays specific topics which the user can slide on or off. Here you can also select your news sources, edit your profile picture, and review recent articles.
So back to our main problem. We needed to fix the issue with news being fake, untrustworthy, and biased. We also needed to add an easy way to validate news. So, to fix this, when you select the article, it takes you to this screen where you can read more about that topic from multiple news sources. You can choose the sources that you trust as your top buttons. The app will then cycle through and pull those articles from that news source.
Test ✓
Final steps were to test high fidelity mockups and see if the user could understand how our app worked without instructions. We are still improving and making changes as we test. It's an ongoing process and we've received some amazing feedback. Here is a working prototype and most recent version.