MAGPIE

How might we design personalised news experience with modular content? - in just 2 days

To answer the brief of this fully remote 2-day design challenge, we envisioned an app that enables users to encounter news content based on geolocation data. A user can discover, collect, enjoy, and share news content in a more contextualised way, while walking, shopping, or commuting. Our team also hope that this situated way of engaging with the 'news around us' can bring the audience and their local environments closer than ever before.

design brief

BBCNews has a massive repository of news contents that have not been utilised after the primary use, and would like to find ways of reusing these news contents by breaking them into a meaningful chunks - 'modular contents'.
BBC News wants to create personalised news experiences.

our design solution

TECHNOLOGY & USER EXPERIENCE

A mobile app that lets users tailor local news playlists while they are out and about, using short clips (modular content), as opposed to full news stories.
Users also can choose "Adventure mode" while not on a specific journey but looking to discover news matched to their current locations based on geolocation metadata.
Through collecting points, sharing experiences, scoring by answering quizzes, users can also create and connect with local communities.

TARGET USERS

We designed for everyone, however, we created persona 'Lucy (28)' as females in their 20s-30s are the least engaged user groups of the BBC.

My Roles As a UX Researcher

Exploratory | Persona | User journey | Expert reviews | Team size: 7

Persona

My key role is to contextualised all the awesome ideas and technical innovation the team are excited about. Persona is a tool we could use as a team to define and orient our product direction.

Since we don't have time to conduct exploratory research, we created three personas based on team members news experience.

We chose 'Lucy' as a target audience.

User journey

Another challenge was to define the scope of initial design to showcase. For this, we first created end-to-end journey and picked key screens that can explain the essence of the user experience and ethos of our product.

Advocating users

Four out of seven team members were engineers. At an early stage of ideation, I noticed the discussion tend to be driven by technology instead of focusing on user goals and experiences. As a UX researcher, I kept asking the team this question 'So, what will Lucy get with our product, compared to the status quo?'

Presentation

After the team agreed on the product design, we split the work between prototyping and presentation. Myself and the journalist worked together to craft the message, focusing on:

How our design answers the brief
How our design benefit the users
How our design can scale moving forward

Portfolio: Magpie

Figure 1: Team presentation slides (demo is excluded)

Result

Our design won the prize: Best New Audience Experience
Our design provoked other innovative ideas among the judges at the BBC.

Future development

Free-up the development as open-source to encourage other content creators, such as local newspapers can also use and enrich contents and user experience
Incorporating community-building aspects from gamification, e.g. local news champions

RefLection

Having a set of ideation workshops facilitated not only discussions but also team-building for a brand-new, fully dispersed team.
The use of Miro offered us to have one single place where the team can find everything, enabling us to share ideas visually and quickly.
We could have defined the scope earlier, as we had to rush through design and prototyping. The voting function could be useful to be decisive, however, when the team is small, voting can only split the number of votes, (e.g. 2 vs. 2 vs. 3.)

comments from the judges

“It's very thought-provoking. Could it be sentiment/interest-tagged? If by the sea, in a park off speech content/music around that; or even material from learning pages?“

"How cool would it be to virtually explore an area so you could walk around places over the world."

“Would be really nice for local journalists to use this and re-use, refer to pre-existing content.”

"A really good incentive to tag segments with places or to directly extract geolocation from cameras."

team

Myself (Ideation, user advocacy, design, presentation)
Engineer x 4 (Design, prototyping, coding)
Archivist (Sourcing contents)
Journalist (Ideation, presentation)

Figure 2: We used Miro for this design challenge. It made it really easy to work collaboratively yet remotely.

Remote workshops for ideation

To help generate ideas, we used several ideation techniques, thanks to the awesome NewsLabs team. Setting a timer is always a good idea to free up your mind!

100 ideas in 10 Minutes
P.O.I.N.T (Problem, Opportunity, Insight, Need, Theme)
Round Robin
Head Heart Hands
Beetle

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