Abstract

Timeline • Role

June 2023 - August 2023 • Solo project

ProbleM

News articles are boring, but the events behind them are not. Hence their exploration turns into a tedious daily routine.

Solution

A news app that helps people stay up to speed with essential US news in no time. Once a day, in the morning, we deliver concise & fun digests that cover the top US stories and provide you with the key information you need to stay informed.

Part 1: Understanding the problem

While a concise daily news digest app is applicable to everyone I believed that this problem of catching up with the news in a fast & fun way most affected the college age market. Thus, I interviewed several college students across my network to better understand how they received their news.

Based on the interview responses I have received from college students, I found that most of them resort to social media platforms for their news, finding traditional publishers like CNN too biased and boring. These are some of the questions I asked:

1. Where do you primarily get your news?

2. What type of news do you read/watch?

3. Where/when each day do you get your news?

Part 2: Coming up with ideas and solutions

Students wanted quick, fun, and dynamic news every day. They resorted to meme accounts on social media platforms and traditional media platforms on new formats like Snapchat Discover. Thus based on the journey map below, I decided to combine the best of both worlds creating a design focused on quick & meme-filled news with a new “format” to read the news that would excite the younger generation.

Part 3: DECIDING + PROTOTYPING

Next, I started to look at different UI to design the app. Quartz, Yahoo Daily Digest, Snapchat, and Twitter were great sources of inspiration!

Part 4: ROUND OF TESTING AND IMPROVEMENTS

After much iteration and development, I eventually came to a couple of key design choices for the final version:

1. Easily digestible “news blocks” that allow you to get a quick view of the news, but also dive deeper if you may want to

2. A countdown to tomorrows news to create FOMO for the user to come back

3. Color coordinated news articles by topic to allow for quick and easy at-a-glance previews

Reflections

Overall, I had a great time “rethinking the news” with the Abstract app and I hope to take many of the lessons I learned in this project into my future work. A couple of quick things I learned from this project include:

• Keep designs as simple & easily digestible as possible. Many users don’t want super complex interfaces.

• Thinking from a first principles approach of how do I solve a problem is the best way to create a new & exciting interface for an app