The Prompt
During this group project at General Assembly we were tasked with educating voters via the CNN news app on the current election cycle, as well as keeping voters engaged in politics on an ongoing basis nationally and locally. The team worked together to determine what features and interactions should be added to the current CNN app to help us best achieve the goals of voter education and increased voter engagement.
*Please Note: The goal of this project was not to alter the visual aesthetics of CNN's site/app.*
My Role
My main focus on this project was building the final prototype. Myself and another team member paired on the visuals for the mobile and tablet versions. I also played a role in surveying users, competitive analysis research, ideation and brainstorming sessions, creating personas, building user flows, producing site maps, and facilitating user testing.
The Process
To start off, we conducted a series of 3 surveys. We received over 150 responses and used this information we received to identify user needs, pain points, and other areas of opportunity.
Competitive Analysis
We wanted to see how our competition was performing so we completed a competitive analysis against 7 other voter education/news app s and websites. We chose the competitors based off of survey replies and online popularity. It’s was clear to see that CNN had some very clear areas of opportunity to address.
Personas
Now that we had information completed our surveys and competitive analyses we were ready to build our personas. For this specific product we built 2 personas, Michael Millennial and Information Ashley.
Ideation
When creating our preferred user flows we had 2 goals. The first goal was to reduce the number of clicks/taps the user needed to make in order to access relevant information. This would help us provide quality content in a more timely fashion. Our second goal was to make certain content accessible that was originally unavailable on the site. This was included but not limited to candidate bio pages and view points on popular issues for each candidate.
Low Fidelity Prototyping and User Testing
Because this was a class project we were running on very limited time. This meant we only had enough time for one round of user testing. To make the most of our time we tested with 5 of our classmates. Our main takeaways from testing were that the Breaking News Alert was not a feature the users felt was valuable and that users wanted the Delegate Count to take precedent over the Candidate Quiz.
High Fidelity Prototype - Mobile
High Fidelity Prototype - Tablet
Future Iterations
Focus on local politics after the presidential election.
Update quiz to reflect Senate and House of Representatives.
Use location tracking to notify users when politicians will be in a town near them.
Before, during and after campaign reporting.
Holding candidates responsible for what they promised during campaigns. Fact Checking.
Software Used
Axure
Lookback
Sketch