Rethinking Journalism Part IV: Enabling Democracy Through Better Tools.

A Prototype of a News “Sifting” App

A Prototype of a News “Sifting” App

How do you control the flow of information?

Why keep journalism alive?

Simple.

To enable democracy.

An informed electorate controls the votes, and it also keeps the government accountable with what they use tax funds (democratic membership fees) for.

For example, tax dollars could be used to overthrow a dictatorship, build roads and unfortunately, pay off the mistress of a politician.

Your votes control the flow of tax dollars for better or for worse.

But this isn’t a political post per se, it is more about you, the electorate. Let us avoid talking about fixing the newspaper business model for one post and talk about helping the electorate, the ones who need to be informed.

The Problem

We have never had a larger abundance of information at our fingertips, and yet people are not more informed for it. The flood of content and pressures on news organizations to sensationalize turns people off to news consumption all together. This leads to passive consumption of whatever CNN or FOX sticks on your newsfeed (and lets be honest, it usually isn’t hard news.)

Here are the pain points that we know of so far:

1. The flood of information and misinformation can discourage one from even trying to actively search for facts.

2. Users are flooded with partisan propaganda by watching a video that remotely affiliates with a political party. This negates bi-partisan exposure.

3. News needs to be consumed in a way that respects the readers time, and time spent looking for the the facts is time they could have spent somewhere else. The process needs to be streamlined.

Browse > Queue > Consume this flow allows the reader to curate what news they will consume instead of an algorithm doing it for them. Thank WP for getting ahead of the curb!

The Ideation

The main inspiration that sparked this concept app was the new Washington Post app. Which so far is the best news consumption experience I have found so far. They are on to something, here’s why:

What makes the experience so good is the flow. It is this:

Browse > save articles that look interesting by pressing the ★ button > read the story. This allows you to browse through a credible news source and “save for later” articles that look interesting. It creates a reading list curated by the reader that they can use to stay informed and maintain a sense of agency.

My hypothesis is that if the tool you use helps you curate the content you consume instead of curating it for you, this becomes the antidote to better news consumption.

Think about apps like Tinder. They allow you to curate a list of people that hopefully are interested in you. The swipe right and swipe left gesture is a gesture that gives agency to the user, which makes the app so popular.

Imagine if Tinder was like Facebook and it just suggested people you’d be interested in based off an algorithm. “Hey I see you like country music so we are suggesting these girls/boys…” It simply wouldn’t work.

When it comes to big life decisions, like relationships and politics, you can’t control the flow of information, you must give agency to the individual.

If your product influences big life decisions, the UI must enable user agency.

On that same thread, think about investing.

The angel investing app “Newchip” has taken this principle of agency centric UI to heart, and allows you to sift through investment opportunities in a card layout fashion.

Swipe right or left to queue up interesting investment opportunities.

The Sketches

So when I take out my moleskin notebook to sketch the UI, I think of these potential fixes to the originally stated problems.

Control the flow of information with a RSS feed that originates from credible news sources. Those articles will go in the “feed”.

The feed will not be controlled by a algorithm that favors interest, it will be a stream of relevant stories where the algorithm controls what is trending and what is most newsworthy.

To respect the readers time, the UI will be agency centric, where you can queue up articles you are interested in.

Browse and Scroll > Swipe Right to Save > Consume > Swipe right to batch in the social feature > compose thought and swipe right to send. This works as a production flow to sift through the stories and also contribute to the conversation.

It is similar to what the Post is doing with one additional tweak to the design. A Buffer like queue where you can prepare social posts. The tool will enable democracy with the spreading of accurate information. It will help a reader vet stories by sifting through the flow of information and then batch the articles they have opinions about into a social feed list.

How the Sausage is Made

For this prototype I used Adobe XD and Tumult Hype. You create the assets in XD and you can then copy/paste components into the Hype editor.

Based off the sketches, I created the UI in XD and grouped animatable components. I then would copy and past those individual components into Hype to animate them. Iwould then test the prototype on in the Hype Reflect App to test flow and functionality.

The Version 0.1

The Hype Prototype. Borrowing from Newschip’s card sorting UI it allows the reader to sift, vet and share trending news stories like an assembly line.

The Conclusion

This is still a rough concept, but I think it is an essential part of the conversation on how you can make journalism work in a post print age. Tools need to be made that enable the user to better consume the news — not optimize revenue for companies by creating clickbait and preroll ads. This model would favor a paywall business model that influences the integrity of news organizations. It is my hypothesis that if the user is happy with consuming the news, revenue will follow.

Caden Damiano is a User Experience Designer based in the Silicon Slopes of Utah. If you liked this article, give it some claps 🙂