One-stop destination where users can find all the content from over 100's of sources based upon their interests, topics, authors or publishers.
This side project is being designed with the aim to sharpen my end-to-end skills in the design process.
This project is being developed by an ex-colleague, Jasdeep Madan, from Thoughtworks. He wanted to build a product for people to read personalised content for which he had already built a website.
My role in the project is defining user experience of the product and designing its interface. I'm going to share the process that lead us to build the feeds page for yomu.
Since this product was already based on some business goals and assumptions, I decided to carry out a customised approach for the product redesign.
Here are some activities and tasks I carried out throughout the design process:
Early meetings helped me to understand the product in depth including aspects like:
After our initial meetings, I sketched a few paper mockups to understand which concepts better define our product according to the business, which eventually helped me to move in a particular direction.
The goal of our user research was to understand the behaviour of the user as well validation of the existing features.
So, I created a method that comprised of surveys, 15 minutes user interview and 45 minutes usability testing.
Based on the research, we identified that the customer segment comprised of IT professionals aged 25-44 years.
Key insights for a typical user were:
Based on the users’ votes, Google News, HackerNews, Twitter, Medium were the most popular to find content.
I also analysed some similar products - PaperOak, Feedly, Google’s Discover which helped me to understand what they offer and what is the rational behind them.
We came across a number of opportunities to enhance the user experience based on users' pains and the most important jobs which they want to do.
Therefore, we decided to redesign the user journey of how a user accesses the feeds page.
In order to design a logical flow on how user reaches the feeds page, the user journeys of registered and first-time users were considered.
The user goes to the feed page directly in case they have added their preferences.
Based on the assumptions and analysis, I created a number of solutions by which users could access the feeds page.
The feedback during the prototype testing gave me a better understanding of the user's mental models.
After analysing the feedback on the paper prototypes, I decided to build a solution that would allow both registered and guest user to land on feeds page.
Personalisation is only offered to the registered user but both types of users land directly on the feeds page where they can access:
The feeds page was redesigned based on the paper prototypes. It had simplified interactions to 'view' or 'follow' a topic, source, tag or author.
Users can search content, read articles or look at what's trending on their landing page. Signed in users can 'like', 'dislike', 'share' or 'save' an article.
