Topicks

Objective

Design a platform to surface all perspectives of a story allowing readers to create a more holistic opinion on topics.

Overview

Topicks is a service that presents users with the most relevant daily news topics, and their various viewpoints. We want to provide the viewpoints that sometimes go unheard based on sources viewers/readers naturally gravitate towards. By understanding others viewpoints, we believe that people can better form their own opinion.  

The process

Target audience:

Define the problem: Our first step was to conduct interviews to better understand where & why people viewed &/or listened to news and political sources they do. Based on our research we learned most opinions were influenced by friends and family and news sources that were shared by surrounding influences.

What we found was individuals mostly formed opinions based on the people they surrounded themselves with and did not take the time to research . The difficulty for people was there didn't seem to be a relevant and well known source to refer to in order for people to read about all sides to a topic and not be influenced by skewed information. 

Once the problem was frames, we took it to the whiteboards. We began brainstorming different ways of navigating the user to the topics they would be interested in by categorizing information by location, logical groupings of topics, and popularity.

After more research we found that most of the time users wanted to search by category or a specific topic.

How it works

Part of the problem we were solving for was figuring out how we would be able to make this work and the diagram below is a summary of how we saw the app aggregating data to present to our users.

Through the research we did we wanted an app and desktop version of the platform that allowed our users to gain knowledge on the go and in the comfort of their homes. Whether it be on the bus or in a coffee shop our users would be able to access the platform and inform themselves of all aspects to issues they deemed important.

My Role

Concept design

Wireframes and storyboarding

Assisted with video recording and editing