THE MICHIGAN DAILY: MOBILE APPLICATION PROTOTYPE

THE PROBLEM

The Michigan Daily is the University of Michigan’s largest source of campus information. Most traffic comes from mobile devices, but the Daily does not have a mobile application. Additionally, data shows that the average time spent interacting with an article, and the average number of shares articles get on social media, has decreased in recent years. The Daily has a responsive website that supports one type of content: an article, occasionally accompanied by photographs and infographics.The website cannot send users push notifications, does not sum up stories in bullet points or short paragraphs, and does not provide essential non-article information like one-sentence blurbs on important speakers coming to campus or notifications when a campus building has lost power. I spent the fall 2016 prototyping a mobile application to address some of these problems and make the Daily a more accessible campus information source. 

INITIAL IDEAS

My ideas for this project originally revolved around expanding the idea of content in journalism. Articles with photos or infographics are the most common method of disseminating the news, but not always the most engaging. What if every Daily story could be summarized in 400 characters? What if these summaries made stories more engaging and increased the number of readers scrolling to the end of a full article? What if a mobile news application provided more than just articles and summaries, but considered one-sentence long blurbs about speakers coming to campus or Ann Arbor restaurant week as integral sources of information?

In our initial brainstorming, my team hypothesized that Tinder-swipe model where students swipe left or right depending on their interest in a piece of content could help the Daily tailor this interface to each individual’s preferences. This mobile application could increase engagement and make information more accessible to students, and could also expand the idea of what campus information — and the purpose of The Michigan Daily — is.

COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS

When considering our competitors, we assessed them on five factors: 100 words (is information summed up in a way that is quick to read?), feed (is the information accessible in some sort of feed?), calendar and capabilities (capabilities of the competitor, including personalized capabilities like calendar synching), speed and accuracy, and audience. You can read my full competitor analysis here .

SKETCHES

Based on our personas - 20-year-old politically active student Anna, linguistics professor Monika who wants to know the most important information on the University, and uninformed engineering senior John - I created some initial sketches to hash out our design ideas.

PAPER PROTOYPES

Using our sketches for inspiration, we prototyped the first iterations of our application using paper, scissors, sticky notes, pens and highlighters. We user tested these prototypes in class to find and fix flaws.

  

DIGITAL PROTOTYPE

After we ran user tests to determine initial issues in our paper prototypes, we prototyped our application using Sketch and Principle. We released this in two iterations. We user-tested the first iteration to identify errors and opportunities for improvement, which we then addressed in our final prototype.