Our National Conversation
BackOverview
Problem
In recent years, American politics have grown increasingly polarized, making it difficult to have civil discussion between individuals of differing political affiliations. Many media sources are highly biased, leaving no room to find a middle-ground of any sort.
Solution
ONC is creating a website that exposes people to news from all political angles via a news aggregator, proposes nonpartisan, evidence-based policy solutions, and provides moderated forums for civil discussion
My role
Lead UI/UX Design Intern in a team of 5 designers and 4 developers
Scope
July - September 2020
Internship
Research
Surveys
Before starting the design process, we explored the problem area by distributing a survey to 53 respondents aged 18 to 76+.
The following is data on what respondents desired from news sources.
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1. 83% of respondents were moderately to highly likely to seek opposing viewpoints or opinions about political topics.
2. There was a lot of frustration that news outlets were overly biased.
3. People tended to choose news sources that they felt were reliable and provided a variety of news sources, stories and opinions.
Competitive Analysis
We completed a competitive analysis on the top news sources that we gathered from survey data.
1. Major news outlets are highly-biased and lack strong user engagement or discussion.
2. Social media/community-based news sources do not offer fact checks and are not properly moderated. They often serve as echo chambers that make it difficult to seek opposing perspectives.
Persona
Our research insights were then synthesized to create a persona of our target user group.
Wireframes
Wireframes of the primary screens were created to get a sense of the basic building blocks of the website. The wireframes consisted of common design patterns while incorporating the unique content of ONC.
Annotated Homepage
Key Page Wireframes
UI Design
Key Pages
The following is the UI for ONC's pages: the homepage, news, opinions, and solutions pages.
All Pages
Here are all the final pages we created.
Prototype
Reflection
Working within constraints can lead to creative outcomes. Faced with engineering, budget, and timeline constraints, we were forced to prioritize and scope our decisions. We threw together our rough ideas and iterated over and over until we came up with the best collective solution. Continuously receiving quick, rough feedback refined our design direction.
Involve engineers often and early. Collaborating with the engineering team was invaluable in understanding interactions and design handoffs.
Next Steps
This is an ongoing project with challenges that will evolve throughout development, but I am excited to see ONC launch in the coming year.
Meaningful connections on LinkedIn
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