Spectator App
Transforming the Columbia Daily Spectator (Spec) reading experience from the web to a more convenient and engaging mobile experience.
Project type
Journalism mobile app
Role
UX Research
UX/UI design
Product management
Team
Philippe W., Christina S. Benny Y., and other product designers
Link
Design | Summer 2022 Development | Fall 2022 - Fall 2023 Testing | Spring 2023 - Summer 2024 Launch | Fall 2024
Leading ideation and research, I defined the app’s MVP features, designed wireframes and prototypes. My main objective was to boost user engagement through the app’s intuitive interaction and expanded reach (notifications & sharing).
Post-development, I led testing phases within the Product Team, collaborating closely with Engineering to document bugs and refine interactions for a polished product launch.
Design Highlight:
Fully interactive product
Explore - Read - Save
Modular sections, tailored layout
Customize notifications
Personalize display
Search for sections & articles
Design library for scalable development
Design Process
How can we create a more engaging and timely reading experience?
Problem
Mediocre mobile browser experience
Students prefer convenient mobile devices, yet the current desktop-oriented design results in cluttered elements on smaller screens.
Sections are crowded without clear distinction, and subsections often overwhelm the main content, making navigation difficult.
Limited audience reach
Instagram and email newsletters are our only ways of notifying readers about new publications. This hinders my goal of cultivating a habit among students to visit our platform more frequently.
Research
User Research
Design Opportunities
Competitive Analysis
Refined Design Goals
To validate our assumptions, we designed surveys on students’ browsing and notification preferences.
2 Key Findings:
Over 80% consume news on mobile over desktop
More than 60% enable notifications on news apps
This indicates strong potential for Spec's mobile notifications to boost engagement.
1. Better mobile interaction, more focused reading
2. Boosting Engagement:
From survey: While over 50% of students read news a few times a week, their engagement with Spec drops to only a few times a month. We can aim to minimize this gap through customizable notifications on spec.
We studied successful news apps for design inspiration, including both major outlets and university groups.
The New York Times, Bloomberg, The Washington Post, The Daily Pennsylvanian, & The Stanford Daily
With these insights, our priority was to enhance UX and provide a more personalized experience
Restructure Mobile Navigation & Layout to enable users to quickly find their preferred news types.
Customizable Experience: Implement sharing, saving, and display settings unsupported by the browser to optimize individual experience and encourage sharing within user circles.
Refined Notifications: Develop tailored alerts to draw users back to Spec regularly.
First Wireframes
The Product
Streamlined user experience allowing user to navigate easily across different sections
Modular, Carousel Navigation
Seamless browsing through subsections
Improved Visual Hierarchy
Prioritizes top stories with large, attention-grabbing cards; other articles use smaller cards to ensure clear focus.
Each article is paired with a snippet to better inform itself.
Tailored Notifications
Personalized alerts for breaking news and updates, increasing user engagement.
Sharing & Saved Articles
Easy sharing promotes reach; saved articles feature allows readers to keep track of important content without multiple browser tabs.