Overview
A news portal for all sides to see the others in the hope to connect.
Summary
This project is a design challenge held by the New York Times + Adobe XD, and we got into the TOP 10 Finalist over 200+ teams from the US and Canada.
Team
Xinyuan, Yao
My Role
UX Research
UX Design
Tool
Adobe XD
Illustrator
P R O M P T
Design a user-centric mobile-first experience that increases trust and credibility in election content for readers.
Understand the Problem
Start from questions
As international students, we are not very familiar with election, so we started from 3 basic questions to help us quickly grasp the core concept of the prompt.
WHO is our target user?
WHAT are their needs?
HOW to define credibility?
Day 1: initial thoughts on whiteboard
Interview for more context
After desktop research, we gained a basic knowledge about how the election works. But we still need to know more context about how people read news about it, and how the newsroom plays a role in this process. So we asked 2 experts, one is a reporter in the U.S., and another is a political economist. Then we went to street and asked 7 pedestrians.
Synthesize Data
We then synthesized the response from our interviews, by summarizing their jobs and needs to see where the opportunities could be.
Gather Insights
01 People demand trustworthy information to learn more about the other side.
We learned from research that it is almost impossible to change people's political beliefs. However, many actually want to learn about the other sides, whether to understand their parents, or have a less accusing conversation with a high-school friend on Facebook.
02 Friends and neighborhood can provide connection and raise trust.
People tend to believe and be influenced by others around them, since it brings more sense of closeness and connection.
03 Visual cues and content-related information help identify credibility.
During the street interview, we printed out news sources as paper prototypes for people to critique their feelings and trust of the content. It turns out that the way news is displayed can highly influence whether people trust its content.
Finalize Goals
Finally, we reframed the problem and finalized our design goals:
Prioritize Features
What might our primary user group need? Based on our research on target user groups, we prioritize some features from a long potential feature list, to build the MVP for this project.
Design the Journey
Through sketching the common user flow of Polygon, I created the journey to show how users will navigate through the pages and achieve their goals while consuming news.
Lo-fi Sketches
Style Guide
As we touched on the UI design of Polygon, we hoped that the interface should keep simple but attractive. So I chose the black and white theme plus the purple-blue to reflect that neutrality and professionalism.
F I N A L S O L U T I O N S
Design for Trust
Final Presentation
W E M A D E I T 🎉
Since we got into the finalist(top 10), we got the chance to present our prototype to the judges from Adobe and the New York Times.
We received valuable feedbacks from the judges as they determined our final score. They are impressed about our idea of presenting different political stands, and appreciate our design style to keep it clean and consistent. Of course there is room for improvement, including bring forward main function to users, and more explicit explanation for score compositions, which will help guide us in next steps.
Final Score
Reflection
01 Time management
Since it’s only a 7-day design challenge, it was essential to keep the project managed and moving as quickly as possible. We did a great job of setting up timelines and distributing our task in a Notion page. But looking back, we took a little longer in the research part, which led us with less time to design the interface. Next time we would prioritize our work and put more time into designing and iterating.
02 Team work
This is the first time I participate in a design sprint challenge, and I’m excited and grateful that me and Xinyuan made a great team. Under the pressure of our respective school work, we found ways to arrange our schedule and communicate our working styles.
Next Step
Usability testing
Within the time constraint, we didn’t have time to do usability testing. So next step is to conduct the testing and iterate our current screens to improve the user flow. Also we would also like to find a way to measure the success from our app.