SNIP, the News app for non-readers – A UX Case Study
What this article covers:
- Discovery + Research
- Research Synthesis + Problem & Solution Statements
- User Flow Map + Wireframes
- Rapid Prototyping
- Lessons Learnt + Way Forward
- Conclusion
Discovery
For our very first project in the General Assembly UXDI Course, it was essentially an exercise which led us through a significant part of the traditional UX Design Process — taking us from research to prototyping (a clickable mobile application) — in 4 days. While it was an individual assessment, we each were assigned a partner who played the role of a client by proposing the theme and initial direction for the project.
“I would like to consume News more often, but a lot of what I come across are not articles I want to read because the topics are not in my areas of interest, and I am not motivated to read them.
|
That has sometimes left me out of conversations with my group of friends when they talk about certain topics I’m unaware of.”
Through early discussions with my partner (shout-out to the amazing Tezel!), it became clear that the problem I am looking to solve will be News-related, specifically addressing a target audience who does not have a habit of reading the latest News regularly.
With that direction in mind, I started looking up the Internet for studies done on the reading habits of Singaporeans. I came across this 2016 study conducted by the National Library Board (the results of the 2017 study have not been published yet), which revealed that almost a third of Singaporeans read the News only once a week or even less frequently.
It was a surprising statistic to find, given that many News sources are digitised and readily accessible these days, and it further affirmed the direction I was heading into.
Research
I went into my research phase using the primary method of User Interviews to gather more data from my target users. Through this process, I aimed to gather feedback which could shed light on the following questions:
- How often do they consume News?
- Through which methods and avenues do they consume News? This includes digital vs. print, social media vs. online news publications, on-the-go vs. stationary, etc.
- What might help them be more engaged to the latest News?
Of the 7 people I spoke to, 4 fit the profile of an irregular News-reader. In fact, their frequency of consuming News ranges from “sometimes” to “occasionally” to “rarely”. However, when do they do read the News, they do it through a variety of means (eg. social media, enterprise news applications, etc.).
“Pictures help me quickly get a sense of what the context and main idea of the article might be. They help me understand the issues better.”
Moreover, perhaps the most interesting findings I received related to the third aforementioned question. Most of them agreed that imagery used in News articles could be a quick way to understand its context and content.
“When the article is too draggy, I tend to lose interest rather quickly.”
At the same time, the length of an article is inversely proportional to the amount of time target users spend on content.
Research Synthesis
Using all the responses gathered through my User Interviews, I started crafting an Affinity Map to organise the data and identify the common themes and relationships between my target users. This helped me extract all the useful insights from my research, which then informed the Problem Statement.
Speed Bump #1
In retrospect, I realised that, because we only had 4 days to complete the project, I was so keen on moving forward with the tasks at hand that I made a fundamental mistake as a UX designer — I went into solution-mode prematurely.
Through my consultations with the course instructors, it came to my attention that I was basing my solution on research observations and not necessarily on insights. In fact, because many of the responses articulated a desire for a more imagery-heavy News mobile application (i.e. more pictures and fewer words), my ideas started drifting down a similar path.
This was an issue because it meant that there was a very high possibility that my proposal of a News application would be unable to sufficiently address the root cause of the problem. With that, I had to take a step back and go much deeper in my research synthesis.
I went through my research findings and interview recordings again, and started asking more WHY questions:
- Why do users want to see more images in their News articles?
- Why do users prefer the article’s content to contain much fewer words?
Things started to click and it eventually struck me that my target users do not necessarily want a more visual solution; what they needed was a solution which could help them save time when reading News.
This led me to the following 2 key insights:
- Relevance of content influences a user’s interest, which in turn affects user engagement.
- A preference for articles with more images and fewer words relates to a deeper desire of spending the least amount of time in digesting the article’s content.
Problem & Solution Statements
With those 2 key insights, I crafted the following Problem Statement:
Almost a third of Singaporean Adults do not have a habit of reading the latest news regularly. They need an easy way to receive quick and relevant News so that they may better engage with the conversations happening around them.
I believe that I can solve this problem by:
Designing a time-saving News mobile application which continually delivers bite-sized articles that are relevant to both the user’s interests and context. This will address the problem of irregular News-reading habits.
User Flow Map & Wireframes
The solution to the problem involves a 2-arm approach:
- Relevance is addressed by delivering news articles curated according to the user’s areas of interest. It is also related to the user’s ability of selecting the articles’ respective age.
- Speed is addressed by delivering bite-sized articles which take only 30s to digest by default (i.e. the content is summarised by Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How factual points). This then allows the mobile app to determine the optimum number of articles to present on each user’s newsfeed, by giving them the flexibility to indicate how much time they have to spend reading. For example, if the user indicates that she only has 5 minutes to spare before her cab arrives at the office, the app will deliver, by default, a total of the 10 most relevant articles to her newsfeed.
Establishing this approach clearly helped me in drawing the User Flow Map.
Speed Bump #2
In the midst of mapping out the User Flow, I was concerned about not leading the user down a dead-end path, so allowing them the opportunity to return to the previous page mattered to me. At the same time, I faced some difficulty working out how my target users moved from one point to another smoothly without first visualising it through wireframes. On the other hand, I could only draw out the complete series of wireframes by falling back on the logic represented in the User Flow Map.
As a result, I found myself toggling back-and-forth between drawing wireframes and mapping the User Flow. It may not be a commonly used process, but it enabled me to make significant progress in the ideation phase.
Rapid Prototyping
Lastly, the wireframes provided the basic skeletal framework to build upon when translating my ideas for SNIP to a clickable prototype.
I then uploaded the screens to InVision before adding the relevant hotspots and button links. Version 0.1 of the prototype can be found here!
Lessons Learnt
SNIP was my very first UX Design project, and while I certainly faced a few challenges along the way, I had a fruitful time putting what I have learnt about the traditional UX Design process into practice. Having said that, here are the 2 key takeaways from this experience:
Entering the solution-mode prematurely has its risks
By becoming fixated on a solution based on research observations rather than research insights, you take on a huge risk that the end product may not even solve the problem you were trying to address.
There are no unicorn users
Just like the myth of the unicorn designer, we should not expect to find a unicorn user who will give us all the insights we need. There may be certain similarities in their responses, but every user will give us their own take on the problems we are looking to solve. This in turn produces different insights which will shape and inform our solutions in various ways. So always seek to ask questions with breadth and at depth.
Way Forward
With those lessons in mind, along with the clickable prototype, the logical next step would be to conduct usability testing with more target users to evaluate its functionality, usability, and even desirability.
- Does the experience work for the target users?
- What aspects of the design need to be addressed in the next prototype?
Conclusion
Learning the traditional UX Design Process and then putting it into practice in the span of 4 days was not easy, but I thoroughly enjoyed the learning and hands-on process. At the end of it, I even managed to design a clickable prototype in the form of SNIP — a time-saving News mobile app, which continually delivers bite-sized articles that are relevant to both the user’s interests and context, with the aim of addressing the problem of irregular News-reading habits.
Still, there is more work to be done, greater lessons to be learnt, and richer avenues of growth for me as an aspiring UX Designer, and I am already looking forward to it.
Thank you for reading this article! I look forward to hearing your thoughts about News-reading and advice on UX Design in general, so please leave a comment below and we’ll connect!
