Simply Context
Simply Context aims to entice readers about potential bias in articles. They want users to note if there is any leaning to a certain political party, as well as inform readers if any of the articles have any AI usage.
Services
Mobile Design
UI/UX Design
User Research
Problem & Solution
Problem: Most news apps have biased stories, ad and payment firewalls, and written by AI and unfortunately there are also very cluttered that user navigation is bad.
Solution: Let users and readers know what stories and articles are possibly biased and written by AI without without having to watch any ads
User Personas
Name:
Fred Smith
Age
45
Occupation:
Trend Researcher
Problem: Fred has always been told that anyone and any company can put a spin on any news story and thus makes him skeptical of an article's bias.
Need: Fred wants to know if his article is written by someone who leans towards a political party or has certain bias towards specific groups.
Solution: Simply Context provides information about an article which includes possible political bias, word count, originality, and number of images used.
Name:
Ted McManus
Age
20
Occupation:
College Student
Problem: Ted has just be handed an assignment to do a research paper on the United States economy, and to make things more complicated his teacher says he can't use any information from a potentially highly biased source.
Need: Ted needs to find articles that cover the economy and are not biased
Solution: Simply Context provides a category that covers the economy and provides information about the articles that present bias levels.
User Research
Process: The initial process was asking individuals what thewy like and dislike about their current news apps, once I collected the valuable data and trends based on the answers it was time to work off the insights and and establish a design direction.
The Design: I performed audits of popular news apps and asked multiple people what works for them and what doesn't. A pattern I noticed with news apps is that articles are often unorganized and misplaced. Based on those insights I decided to have the layout same way Netflix has its layout. Here are some examples of bad layout designs that are clunky, the examples are from CNN and Washington Post.
User Flow
A detailed user journey of the pages a user needs to follow in order to complete task
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Color Scheme
Blue was the main color chosen for the simply context, it is used to to let users know when a button can be tapped.
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Typography
I chose league spartan because it was the most simple and easy to read in different sizes, plus it aligns with the app's name. The variations of the type going from regular, medium, to bold was to establish a visual hierarchy.
League Spartan
Screens
Onboarding Page
The onboarding pages include a progress bar to show the user their progress, this is to reduce impatience during profile creation.
Home Page
The Home Page is arranged using visually hierarchy, it starts with breaking news, recommended content, favorite categories, local news, the short stories. Based on user insights and other news companies Breaking news would be at the top then recommended, favorite genres, local news, then everything else.
Article Information Page
The user can view the statistics about the article they are reading, this includes: originality, political bias, category, word count, and number of images. They can compare articles to others but this feature does require upgrading to premium
Article Page
This is where the user can read the article, if the user doesn't prefer not to read the full article the "summarize" button set on a sticky element. On the right there is drop-down where users can like and comment on the article, I also designed the drop-down to include a statistics button to ensure that users who like and comment, consider the article's credibility and data.
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Results / Deliverables
Mobile Design: A fully functioning mobile app that users would love to see in the app store
Task completion: Testers were able to complete all tasks assigned between 10 to 30 seconds