SmartNews

To build and strengthen the product to reflect the company mission of bridging the political polarization gap by delivering news from all sides.

To sharpen my skillset as a Design leader by introducing and cultivating design process and structure to a previously product/engineering led global team headquartered in Japan. I wanted to see what kind of culture and process would work best for a global team that works more remotely than on-location.

Here is the Design statement that we set as a team. “Design statements” were something I introduced to the team to enable a more unified and user focused process throughout. 

Segment 2: Jennifer “The Cultured Connector”

Cultured Connectors are tech-forward and leverage digital platforms heavily to consume news. They tend to be young, diverse, and liberal professionals living in the suburbs. Cultured Connectors find keeping up with the news important to their social lives.

Segment 3: David & Lisa “The Settled Suburbanites”

Settled Suburbanites are older news consumers who follow US and political news very closely. While over 4 in 10 are retired, they tend to be highly educated suburban dwellers who lean into traditional forms of media for their news content and late adopters of technology.

We prototyped and user tested 3 distinct concepts and mimicked 1 concept of a competitor.

Concept 1: “Red vs. Blue” Balanced View without control. We wanted to know if the most obvious left and right wing distinction would give users the feeling of immediate transparency up front.

Concept 2: Balanced View with Slider (SmartNews UI). We wanted to see if providing users the ability to control what they were seeing would give them a sense of empowerment.

Concept 3: Balanced View with filter (Blue UI). This was the most practical way of controlling what users could view by turning on/off the filters.

Concept 4: Balance through “full coverage” - (Google news UI). We took out the brand logo and name to equalize user perception. 

Utilizing 3 unique concepts, 1 mimicked concept and studying the user’s behavior was a technique I learned when I was building the UX department at a previous company. 

By using the competitor’s design as a prototype, you can learn so much and get some questions answered; “How come they put that there? that’s so different from the norm” “ I wonder what the users think this is…” 

It’s also very interesting to see how much of an impact the design loses and true user feedback competitors’ branding is not included. SmartNews did not have a user test process set up at the time, so introducing this concept test and educating the team throughout the whole process was very impactful for design and product development.

Key learnings:

Option 2 received the most votes for being the “Most Memorable App”.  As well, it was selected as the app that showed the “news from all sides” and design that most users were interested in using for Election 2020.

• Users felt empowered by the fact that they could play with the “balance slider” and see the full picture

• Users were very affected by the CTA copy. The fact that Option 2 said “News from all sides” gave them a good read into what they should expect next.

• By giving them the glimpse into viewpoints from “the other side”, the users were more open to exposing themselves to new territories.

This new feature brought a much needed brand mission to the front and center. 78% of users that interacted with the “balance slider” felt that the brand was more trustworthy (46% a year ago), 83% of them said that SmartNews shows unbiased news (54% a year ago).

What got cut: Users did not want to hear what other people are saying. They wanted to make their own decisions.

Contrary to the team’s belief, adding a social elements brought a lot of negative feelings to the users. There were a lot of burnt out feelings about the last election and their experience through social media. They have lost their trust in social media when it comes to politics and instead of looking at what others are saying, they would rather make that decision themselves through consuming the facts and right information themselves. Giving them a chance to participate and see what others are saying did not give the users the value that they were looking for. We decided to move forward without this idea and focus on the balance slider instead.

As a Design Leader, I established and was responsible for:

• Led the global Design team (Japan and US), conducted 1:1s, design critiques, brainstorms, updates, and strategic planning.

• Worked directly with the SVP of Product and led cross functional strategy meetings, overseeing designs and user research for the growth pillar.

• Building a Design system for the team, including the first component library which sped up cross functional team work by approximately 33%.

• Added User Research as an integral part of the Design process; introduced, managed, conducted, presented the learnings and connected it to the appropriate next move; trained the entire design team to utilize User Research within design tool set.

• Implemented “Design Statements” as an essential process for the design/product teams to re-align and guide project development by ensuring check-in and accountability for users’ value points and cross functional collaboration.

• Worked closely with the Marketing team to bridge the gap between product and marketing; was creative director on marketing materials across various product ads (social media and TV), ensuring product and the users value proposition were clearly communicated through brand voice.