Nomad News
New way to fact-check election news in real-time.
Introduction
Background
During the thick of COVID-19 quarantine in 2021, I looked up a few online UX design competitions sponsored by Adobe that were happening in order to gain collaboration and measure my self-taught UX skills. Adobe and The New York Times had just announced a 1-week design competition so I teamed up with a UX designer from Design Buddies community and got prepared to win.
my role: product designer · presenter
who I worked with: 1 UX Designer
timeline: 1 week
tool: Adobe XD
The Adobe Creative Jam is an international competition where teams of two would design an entire app experience, usually in partnership with a company. Teams are given a problem statement and then sent off to ideate, design, and prototype an entire solution for that problem within 1 week.
"The New York Times is one of the most widely read newspapers in the United States. With over five million digital-only subscribers as of early 2021. Recent survey found that 24 percent of Americans believe The New York Times to be a very credible source of news and information."
Prompt
Election news is accessible today in ways that were unimaginable even just a decade ago. With the rise of technology, sources, and outlets, it is becoming increasingly more challenging to know what political information is reliable, credible, and what or who should be trusted.
Design a user-centric mobile-first experience to provide a way that increases trust and credibility in election content, in some way, for readers. Consider a visual or functional experience that confirms that news, polls, and outcomes are trustworthy to users.
Evaluations
As for evaluations, we kept in mind how the judges would view / analyze our prototype.
-
Does the solution address a target audience and their needs?
-
Does the prototype solve the problem in an innovative way?
-
Is the user experience and interface intuitive?
-
Is visual design used in a thoughtful and meaningful way?
User Research
“Data really powers everything that we do." — Jeff Weiner
Even though we had a very limited amount of time, we wanted to get some data to find out what key features we should focus on within our solution. We believe that understanding users' current process of fact-checking and their trust in the election news will be crucial to design an application that meets their expectations and improve their experience.
We created a Google survey and shared it on Facebook and Instagram to see if we could get some responses. Shoutout to our friends and family because they gave us 78 responses to help guide our design. Below are the results.
.png)
.png)
Objectives
%202.png)
We broke down the design challenge and asked ourselves further questions to understand each term:
• What does trust / trustworthy look like?
• What does credibility look like?
• What is election content?
We aim to create a news app called Nomad News with fact-checking features, and each feature should fulfill the key terms provided in the prompt:
- A feature for users to check if content originates from a trusted source → Credibility
- A reader portal for credible news → Election content
- A feature to confirm the trustworthiness of election-related posts on social media → Trustworthiness
- A feature that allows users to fact check conveniently using the specialties of mobile devices → Mobile-first and Trust
App Structure
Sketches
We chose to build from the home page. Our main focus was to establish a functional and usable foundation that could be recognizable to users yet a fresh take on news media.
Key Features
Detect fake news using AI and machine learning
-
Speech-to-text technology helps users fact-check the news on audio and video sources in real-time, e.g during live election debates. It is also to accommodate the visually impaired and the elderly who aren't as tech-savvy
-
Users scan for misleading information by uploading screenshots or using the camera.
-
Users can fact check by scanning the source URL. Once the scan is done, users will immediately be shown clear indications of false content.
-
A reader portal for credible news
-
Use colors to filter news based on biases
Fake or Fact?
-
Validate authenticity of election posts on social media.
-
Users can filter by adding more tags.
-
When users look up election news on the browser, Nomad News automatically scans and detects any misleading information.
-
Users have the option to turn off this function by going to Nomad News' settings.
Prototype
Judges' Feedback
👍 "I really like the scan idea and also the idea that [Nomad News] will run in background. When someone searches something on the Chrome browser, it will just pop up says if something is false. I think that is really smart and it's an idea I can see being used."
🤔 "Add more credibility to the news portal would be another added benefit to the bias.”
- Chen Wu, Senior Product Designer @ New York Times
👍 "The Fact Bites idea was super cool. A lots of groups approached this idea but I really like the way this group did. The hierarchies are very well done."
🤔 "The carousel on the homepage could be more explicit.”
- Tulio Jarocki, Product Designer @ New York Times
👍 "It is very easy to navigate and I like that I can turn off the auto-scan for the browser. That was very thoughtful."
🤔 "Keep the font consistency between the splash screen and the homepage would carry the brand better.”
- Natalie Dye, Senior Experience Designer @ Adobe
Results
Our team scored 85 / 100 and was in top 3 / 360 submissions from 15 countries.
I'm thankful to Niran for being my teammate and tackling the first Creative Jam challenge with me. It was such an incredible experience. We have proven that virtual teammates can work well together even with 13 hour time zone difference and very little sleep.
You may also like...
.png)
G2Xchange landing page
How might we increase conversion and reduce bounce rate?
Safe Pocket
How might we help users transfer and receive money in different currencies easier?
.png)
