Creating “Newsie”.. A Financial News Aggregator — UX Design Retrospective II
Our UX team wanted to understand the behaviors and pain points of how people access financial news. As we were dealing with a specific area i.e. finance, we decided to interview only those users that regularly read financial news. Our criteria also included users who accessed news on their laptop or phone.
Therefore, we set up a screener survey to identify & recruit users in line with our requirement. As we were working against the clock, we were only able to find 7 people willing to speak to us out of the 23 people that responded to our survey. We conducted user interviews over the phone & in-person:
We asked questions like:
Why do you access financial news?
How do you feel about having multiple news sources?
How do you feel about how much time you spend reading financial news?
To identify key trends from our interview data, we carried out research synthesis employing a methodology called Affinity Mapping, which groups trends together.
Research synthesis resulted in insights such as:
Financial news readers want multiple sources of news for various reasons. These are sources that they consider credible and enjoy reading as a personal preference. There was great variety in the news sources with over 12 sources being mentioned by only 7 users.
Most users were spending over an hour reading every day especially on their desktop/laptop at work in the morning and some were skimming headlines to find news relevant to their area of interest as well as to save time.
Users were visiting up to 5 websites every morning to read news quickly from various news outlets of their choice. They referred to various sources in order to obtain a “well-rounded view” as well as to obtain a ‘different flavor”; they also mentioned that ‘different sources offered different benefits’:
“New Yorker does a deep dive, NY Times is good at reporting & Economist digs deep…”
Users read financial news in order to stay ahead of their career and we identified that users working in finance as well as related sectors all considered staying up to date with such news as critical to their job performance.
We also identified that finance news means different things to different people: users also read business, economic, and political news as they have implications in the world of finance.
We created a persona in order to solve this problem:
We wanted to address the following:
“How can I receive financial news quickly and efficiently?
“How can I receive financial news from multiple sources, that are also credible?”
“How can I spend less time going through lots of financial news websites?”
Problem Statement:
“Kylie is a busy finance professional who has to read financial news from multiple sources everyday to stay ahead in her career.
How might we help Kylie save time but still be well-informed about the world of finance?”
Ideation & Design Studio:
In order to save our users time and provide news efficiently to them, we decided to create a financial news aggregator website which would also include economic, business & political news as well. However, we wanted to divide it clearly by sections so that users could easily read the section that applied to them and scan the rest if they desired. We also wanted the website to be responsive, as they read the news sometimes on their mobile & sometimes laptop/desktop.
Feature Prioritization:
Given that we had limited time & resources, we decided to conduct Feature prioritization:
We decided to brainstorm and sketch out various solutions for this problem — our team conducted a “Design Studio” where we all sketched out our ideas and presented them to each other and further refined the ones we liked as a team.
Low- Fidelity Paper Sketches
Based on our previous research, we added a “Choose Your Sources” feature because it was important for our users to pick their own sources that they trusted and considered credible.
We tested our Paper Prototype on 3 Users to test it’s functionality.
Our user criteria was people who regularly used their phone to read news.
Mid-Fidelity Sketches:
Mid-Fidelity Testing:
There were Moderate Issues with the flow of the website such as not being able to access the full article they wanted to read with one click. We updated our design and made changes for the High-Fidelity Testing:
High-Fidelity Responsive Prototype- Mobile:
High- Fidelity ResponsivePrototype: Desktop
After testing both prototypes, we took notes and plan to incorporate these in the next round.
Please view the prototype and send me your feedback too!
Fun Fact: “Newsie” is a reference to the newsboys that sold newspapers in New York City. In 1899, the streets of New York City were filled with the voices of the Newsboys. Back then, newspapers were the only types of media in the city. They were the only ways to get information about what was going on in the world. (source:https://newsboysstrike1899.weebly.com/background-story.html)
Thank you for reading!
