Role
User Experience Designer
Collaborators
1 PM
5 Developers
Duration
10 Weeks
Skills
Visual Design
User Testing
User Research
Journey Mapping
Prototyping
SUMMARY
The Challenge
How might we turn local news into a shared adventure for Northwestern, where every story sparks connection and conversation?
Solution & Impact
A highly personalized news experience that empowers students to discover compelling articles, engage in meaningful discussions, and spark campus-wide conversations for thousands of peers throughout Northwestern University.
BACKGROUND
What is The Daily Northwestern?
An incredibly well established newspaper organization at Northwestern University hosting more than 400 journalists around campus. It is the main source of news consumption not just for the students at Northwestern, but also the people within the college town of Evanston.
CURRENT PROBLEMS
Possess thousands of articles, but lacks the readership for general students
While there’s a strong internal readership and community within The Daily NU, the general student population is faced with little reason to read the articles, leading to:
Decreased motivation for writers
Uninformed student population
An abundance of unread articles
USER RESEARCH
Both stakeholders and Daily News consumers were interviewed
The Daily NU’s current system of simply publishing articles through the website wasn’t enough for students to be drawn into reading the articles. This opened up a key opportunity for me to design various features to help both students and writers. For this design process, I conducted 8 distinct interviews including journalists, Daily consumers, and general news consumers. Here’s what a couple of students shared in regards to their writing and consumption experience:
DESIGN CONSIDERATIONS
After compiling and analyzing the data, we decided to focus on 3 key points
With a lot of great insights taken away from the interviews, I was able to curate affinity diagrams to better understand what motivates and sways students away from news consumption.
The affinity diagrams helped pick out 3 major key points to focus on
From the organized notes, I determined that students would show interest in personalized news consumption and peer connection, whilst writers would want to maintain viewership and recognition for their work.
Peer-to-Peer Connection
Creating “followship” for writers to allow students to connect with friends
Filtering Out the “Sound”
Providing students with a personalized news experience
Writer Recognition
Increasing the recognition and viewership writers deserve
USER JOURNEY MAP
The journey map assists in understanding more about our users
Developing a comprehensive journey map uncovered critical insights into user flows, emotional highs and lows during the news consumption process, and key touch points where users interacted with different products, revealing pain points, particularly where users experienced frustration.
Touch Points:
Research
Website
Newsletter
Social Media/Messaging
PROTOTYPING
Taking various insights, I began creating physical prototypes
With initial sketches I made, I turned them into a real physical phone mockup in order to record more authentic responses during usability testing with the mockups.
USABILITY TESTING
I explored more ways on how to change different flows through testing
FINAL DESIGN
Finalizing designs and handing off to developers
NEXT STEPS
Next steps after initial launch
Time Spent on "Following Page"
User Retention Rates
Article Production Rates
TAKEAWAYS
Limitations feed creative pathways
Bridging the Physical and Digital