As a UX Bootcamp student, I was placed on a team with three other UX designers and tasked with researching, prototyping, testing, and validating an idea for a brand-new mobile application that solves a real, clearly identified need in users’ everyday lives. We began our process by brainstorming several ideas for an app that solves a daily problem on a whiteboard in Miro. After generating 13 ideas, we voted - agreeing to create a Good News App.
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Users want a better way to get their news without feeling overwhelmed by the information provided.
Daily Fetch is a customizable news app that uses A.I. to re-write news stories in a politically unbiased way, inserts dog puns into stories, and provides mindful PAWS while reading the news to support mindfulness.
Qualitative feedback: Users found this solved their problems aorund the news in an unexpected way. For example one user noted, “At first, I wasn't sure if I would use this app but… I realized I identified with everything you found in your surveys. The issues you solved would be a godsend for the kind of things we read on the internet today.”
We looked at a wide range of competitors: a good news app (Goodable), the largest traditional news app in the world (CNN), one of the largest social media platforms for news (Twitter), an app specifically designed to support mindfulness for women (Moody) and the world’s biggest news podcast (The Daily).
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Our competitor analysis corroborated interview & survey data (traditional news outlets clearly increased uneasiness when opening them and reading headlines), provided us with examples of heuristics people are used to in news apps, and helped to demonstrate there is nothing like what we are designing out there.
Objectives:
We conducted a brief four question survey and found that most users:
We interviewed 7 users, typed up their responses on color-coded note cards in Miro, and organized their responses into an affinity diagram and empathy map
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Initially, we wanted our app to only focus on uplifting news, but after our interviews, we realized our app needs to include pleasant AND unpleasant news… BUT delivered in a less politically biased manner that leaves the user feeling uplifted.
Using the findings of the stakeholder and user interviews and survey results, we created a user persona to explore some of the major pain points.
We believe that negative news on traditional platforms can contribute to feelings of depression and detachment (people detaching from current events). Traditional news platforms (including social media) can also be difficult to navigate (think news on Facebook) and can erode trust in actual news sources.
Therefore, we believe by developing a news app containing positive content we will contribute to a person’s willingness to seek out the news and stay up to date on what is going on in the world.
Our users need less biased news, more diversity of voices in the news, to stay current on news in a palatable way, and more uplifting news. Because she gets burnt out and discontented after consuming the news, she is pushed to either disconnect from current events or become depressed.
We believe traditional news outlets over time evolved to increase consumer anxiety, create "clickbait" that breeds fear mongering, and centers the master narrative. We have observed that users have lost faith in traditional news outlets causing them to seek out their news on social media, which leads to a time consuming activity with potentially superfluous and fake information
How might we improve the experience of consuming news so that users stay up to date and feel more hopeful?
The Daily Fetch is developing a news app to help target users who want to stay current with the news but feel overwelmed and dishearted by the biased news ofered on traditional news apps and social media news outlets.
To solve keep users uo to date on the news while also keeping users uplifted and hopeful we ar edeveloping a news app that re-writes traditional news stories taking out as much political bias as possible using AI, and then inserts dog puns into stories along with frequent reminders and suggestions to take mindfulness breaks while consuming the news.
We’re better because we have merged a love of dogs (which a large segment of the population can empathize with) with unbiased news stories. We are believable because we will re-write news stories from traditional news companies like CNN and New York Times.
We worked through several iterations of a user flow before coming to the below user flow.
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To brainstorm what to include in our design, we created an I Like - I Want - What If diagram. We then each choose our favorite ideas from this list.
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We placed our ideas onto a feature prioritization map to help us narrow our focus and keep to ideas with the highest value and lowest effort.
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Create a News App with:
We did not complete a full style guide, or style tile for this project as we were only required to create a mid-fidelity prototype. But we decided to create a color palette to help us bring a higher fidelity prototype to life, as the colors really help to provide the feelings of fun and mindfulness into our app. We also knew this brand had to have a mascot - in dog form. Additionally, laughing as a team during a daily team standup, the name Daily Fetch popped into the conversation and stuck!
[Hanging with Team on a Sunday Funday Check-In]
All three of us sketched out plans for our app. We had some similarity between sketches that we brought into our final prototype. There were some creative gems that stuck out - like Alyssa’s dog mascot popping out and asking the user for a mindful PAWS.
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After sketches, we created a mid-fidelity prototype and conducted 3 user tests. From this testing we realized we needed to make several small changes like:
We had a lot of fun building this project, fun that I believe translated into the design. As one user comented - you "took two things that don't really go together, and make it work - itis an awesome idea!"
Test the latest version for errors and ease of use.
Get some more specific user testing questions and objectives to really look at functionality of each feature.
Spend more time on color scheme.
Figure out how long articles and bulleted summary pop outs should be on average.
Test when mindfulness reminders should pop up.
Conduct more user testing to create the options for: News Categories, Avatars, Mindfulness Activities
Work on how AI re-writes articles and posts them in an automated way
