DESIGN PROPOSAL 1

Pros: concise, affords searching.
Cons: doesn’t afford browsing, no voting/flagging mechanism.

This design alternative takes inspiration from mobile apps that feature a news feed as part of their core functionality, e.g., Twitter. News items are displayed in a sort of ‘capsule’ type window, featuring the picture of the political figure in question, along with a brief summary of the news item itself. Adding to the Twitter analogy was the design requirement that users must be able to easily follow and track political figures of interest, and so a ‘profile’-type screen for each political figure was added from which users can easily check the most recent news items featuring that figure, as well as ‘follow’ them, adding them to their personal news feed.

 

DESIGN PROPOSAL 2

Pros: focuses on browsing the list of politicians to add them, allows exploring different subject topics, allows commenting.
Cons: doesn’t afford searching for a politician, doesn’t make clear how news is shared, commenting might become a problem because of abusive language.

Notes about pictures

A: You can select ‘major politicians’ by country or you can select ‘local politicians’ based on your gps location. The dropdown for ‘local politicians’ just specifies the distance in order to fit your definition of ‘local’.

B: Once you select either the ‘major politicians’ or ‘local politicians’ category (Note: It’s possible for politicians to be in both categories) you can sort politicians by popularity, ‘recent news’ (a politician that has recent news released about him/her), province, etc.

C: Once you select a politician you can sort the news about them by issues such as the environment, the economy, etc. Also, each particular issue like the ‘Kinder Morgan Pipeline Approval’ will have multiple news sources that are considered liberal, moderate, and conservative to get a more clearer and neutral understanding of the issues. Finally, there will be a comment section and all users will be anonymous to ensure privacy and there will be a simple up voting/ down voting system for each comment. Each user will be able to make one up vote or down vote per comment and the comments will be sorted by highest rated, lowest rated, etc.

D: Finally the ‘More News’ button in Picture C will lead you to this menu where you can choose more news about that particular politician with respect to the chosen issue from picture C (I.e. Environment).

 

DESIGN PROPOSAL 3

Pros: affords searching and browsing, supports sharing and flagging of news.
Cons: doesn’t support subject topics for news, news feed is empty by default.

In this smartphone app, the first time user is greeted with a screen that invites them to search for a political figure and offers some suggestions. If the user wants, they can browse the list of politicians by level, area, field of engagement, etc. On the politician profile page, the user can follow the figure, get more information, and see their recent news, activities, and current location.

Once the user is subscribed for news, some news is delivered to the lock screen of their phone. From there, the user can go to the page of the news piece, where they will find a link to the source, as well as the controls for flagging the piece as inappropriate and approving or disapproving of the politician’s activity.

If the user wants to share the news, they can go to a dedicated screen where they will have to paste a link to the source, or choose the politician the news applies to, and specify the place where the news happened. They can then submit the news for community review. Each particular piece is sent for review to several users at one, which they get notified about in real time. Once the piece passes the review, it becomes available for the audience of the app.

 

DESIGN PROPOSAL 4

Pros: good focus on a particular politician with respect to what events relate to them, easy to find all the different news sources for a single event.
Cons: Screen on the third sketch may be confusing for the user (are Breaking news / Top stories related to all politicians or just to a single one?)

On the landing page (sketch 1), there is the list of political figures that the user cares the most. In the sketch, they are labeled as “poli fig 1/2/3”. These are clickable buttons, and will lead users to each political figure’s own news feed page. Also on the landing page, there are “area 1/2” that are either the area the users are in or care the most about. After that, the list of top stories and breaking news is presented.

In the following sketch (sketch 2), I focused on political figures: for each political figure, there is a page that summarizes all the news updates for him or her. All news updates are grouped by each distinct event, therefore no report on the same event will be presented twice. If the user wishes to browse different sources reporting on one particular event, he or she must click on the event itself, which will bring the user to the page solely dedicated to one news feed (sketch 3). This allows user to choose which feed he or she wants to read first. The sources are ordered alphabetically, which helps avoid bias that might be introduced by the popularity of a particular source, or user’s personal preferences.

 

DESIGN PROPOSAL 5

Pros: allows a fair bit of flexibility and discovery when browsing the news, rich profile pages for political figures, encourages users to read articles before expressing opinions.
Cons: assumes the need for administrators, will require more editorial effort.

This design alternative takes inspiration newsfeed style applications like Reddit.

Consumption is done via push notifications or browsing the newsfeed. Users are only able to vote on articles once they have opened them, and spent at least 2 minutes reading the article. The “story page” also allows users to switch between different perspectives on the same headline. The newsfeed can be sorted by controversial, hot, or new (the main interests of our study pool).

Sharing using this app is done anonymously. There is a grace-period that an article must go through before it is published on the site. During this period, admins will approve the site.

Users are also able to follow popular nearby politicians. The politician’s basic profile consists of details that are relevant to users: recent news, party, political leanings, etc.

The option to remove sources is also available, this can be done to test one’s own biases.