Smell
NewsSpike
NewsSpike makes understanding political language accessible and allows users to ask questions in a safe, judgment-free space.
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Duration: 6 weeks
Role: UX and UI Designer
Tools: Figma
Problem
Dialexa Edu is a certificate program that immerses students in the environment of a technology startup. A team from UTD, UNT, and TCU each worked on creating a solution to the following prompt.
"2020 brought with it an awakening in the United States political sphere. We saw local community driven organizations initiating social change on a national scale, change that could only start at the local level in order to gain visibility and initiate action at higher levels of government. Right now, more than ever, the voices of the common people seem to be rising.
If change starts at the bottom, how can we educate, give a voice, and make it easy for people within the local Dallas community to participate in the change they want to see? A main goal of this Proof of Concept (POC) would be to create a platform void of political labels, focused solely on the issues, content, and events happening in our city."​
Personas
With NewsSpike, our goal was to not only make learning about politics easy, but provide ways to get involved with the local community too. But before we could do that, we started out by taking a closer look at our target audience. For this project, we were given two personas; Abigail and Randall.
To understand our users' needs we created empathy maps. We put ourselves in their shoes to figure out what they think and feel throughout their day.
For Abigail, a lot of that looks like Instagram stories, popular social media creators, and navigating school and family life. On the other hand, Randall hears his peer’s personal experiences and worries for the safety of his own kids but focuses more on his work life as he doesn’t have time for much else.
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After analyzing the user personas and empathy maps, we then created user journey maps to better understand our users’ pain points.
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Here are some of the insights we discovered:
PAIN POINTS:
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No space to connect and meet like minded people
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Not having a single spot to find local initiatives
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Not knowing where to begin when it comes to finding reliable sources of information
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Not being able to understand the political language in many articles
USER GOALS:
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To be able to sign up for events, see who is attending, and share events with friends
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To view an explanation to confusing political language
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Research
To begin solving our challenge, we had to consider NewsSpike’s structure as a platform. NewsSpike as a platform works a lot with Dallas locals, as our Value Proposition is providing users ways to find political events in Dallas and ways to learn more. NewsSpike does this through sourcing events from nonprofits and political organizations and articles from existing news publishers.
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Thanks to our Value Proposition drawing in tons of eyes looking for events, NewsSpike seeks to earn revenue through hosting advertisements on our site.
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Now that we have established how NewsSpike runs as a platform, how do we fit into the industry?
We wanted our features to reflect our app’s core function: to encourage and provide users with opportunities for Civic participation and opportunities to expand their awareness by educating themselves on socio political topics.
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And so, our features are divided into three main categories:
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Features to encourage civic participation
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One of our star features will allow users to sign up for local events like Town Hall meetings or volunteering events​.
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Features to help raise awareness and educate
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Our articles will have highlighted keywords that, when tapped on, provide the user with the definition and external links for more information.
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Gamification features to encourage user participation
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We wanted our users to also have fun when using our app. Users are able to earn badges when they’ve signed up for x amount of events.
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Ideation
We were inspired by modern UI/UX apps that had a clean and simple layout. We also decided to include a mascot in our app to make learning about politics more approachable and user friendly.
To get started on building NewsSpike, we began to work on a map of what our app’s navigation would look like. This process helped us figure out what Randall or Abigail would need to do to get started on their new journey on NewsSpike.
Prototype
After showing the wireframes to our peers and mentors and getting feedback, we figured out which features to keep for our high fidelity designs. We changed the profile page and updated the homepage to include recommended events and articles. We applied our colors and fonts using orange as an accent color for buttons, highlighted text, and other icons. For the leaderboard on the profile page, we added colorful icons to enhance the gamification aspect. Lastly, we added our mascot Spike.
Deliver
With our design and feature set ready, we, in the execution phase of our project, defined a minimum viable product and created our prototype based on it.
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For our minimum viable product we gathered the most essential features from our prioritization road map, the features that would really define our product such as the signing up for events, articles, and being able to share those items. Our future updates would include the gamification aspects of the app but the core of it is easily expressed through the MVP.
Takeaways
My experience with the Dialexa Edu Program was really rewarding. At the end, my team and I presented our solution to our mentors and other stakeholders at Dialexa. We learned a lot just from hearing the other teams' approaches to the problem we were presented with.
I enjoyed working with the other designers on my team, Miranda and Gaby, and appreciated the opportunity to see what the engineering and business aspect of a tech startup would involve as well. I loved being able to sit down with everyone on our team of 6 throughout the program and go through exercises to figure out what our clients needed, what they viewed us as, and how we wanted to be viewed by them. This helped me get a holistic view of the project we were working on as a designer.
My biggest takeaway from this experience was that a designer can always do more research to better understand their users.