Designing a News App in an Age of Filter Bubbles

The Problem

Even for people who are aware of these issues, it is a struggle to stay informed on current events due to inherent news biases and the issues plaguing the news media industry.

The Outcome

A mobile-first application that exposes readers to multiple perspectives from multiple news outlets, provides any information needed to fully understand the events, and avoids providing overwhelming amounts of information to consume.

01. Preliminary research

So, how do people read the news?

Some general research

We first started with general research to get a better understanding of people's news consumption behavior. Some of our insights:

There exists a popular belief that young Americans are apathetic and disengaged from current events. And while we discovered through this research that they tend to be more cynical, they are not completely removed from it and the majority are concerned about issues and the future.

We sought to empower these misunderstood young Americans who are interested in being informed, but who have not found success thus far.

And seeing the shift of news readership to the web and on mobile phones, we focused our designs on the mobile platform.

Interviews

Having narrowed down our scope a little, we reached out to a few people who matched our target user (young Americans with a desire to stay up-to-date on current events). We wanted to learn more about their news consumption habits and pain points they currently experience. Here's a few key points:

02. Project scope

Using our research insights to define the project

With our research insights, we were able to understand our problem space and design opportunity. We decided to narrow down on a few specific focuses:

• focusing on mobile
• designing for young Americans
• making news easier to digest, so understanding current events requires less effort
• offering easy access to different perspectives, so readers don't have to put in so much extra effort to do so
• building critical thinking skills, so readers can learn to form their own opinions

03. Ideation

Crazy eights

(8 minutes to create 8 sketches of user interaction)

Because of how fast-paced (stressful) this exercise is, it helped us to generate a large quantity of very varied solutions, instead just getting attached to our first idea. In particular, it allowed us to explore ideas outside of the standard 'big list of articles you can read' structure that we had taken as standard among news apps.

---

04. Iteration

Mid-fidelity wireframes

Mid-fidelity wireframes helped me further visualize a handfull of possible solutions. This was especially useful in helping incorporate the research insight that users want an interface that offers articles from multiple perspectives, but still does not require too much extra effort to do so.

Some of these, which limited the number of topics/articles the user is shown in a day, contained critical ideas of preventing information overload that continued to influence our final designs.

High-fidelity and prototyping