The design problem we are aiming to fix is the redundancy of articles and the information within them that can be seen in a variety of news and social media sites. Upon looking for a piece of information, there is often an overwhelming amount of news that users are responsible for parsing through in order to find what they’re looking for. This is a major issue. News pollution has caused some to completely give up on staying informed. Too overwhelmed to click and read every article, many people simply rely on the headlines they scroll past to stay updated.
This cartoon from The New Yorker perfectly sums up how many Americans feel about the news.
Additionally, this constant flow of news can end up working as advertising. For example, press tracking firm mediaQuant concluded that Donald Trump received $5.6 billion worth of free media during his campaign. That is more than what Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio combined received. This free publicity isn’t just beneficial for politicians. During the constant stream of news following Mark Zuckerberg’s congressional hearing regarding Facebook’s use of their user’s data, Facebook stock rose 4.5% on the first day which was the highest it had been in three weeks. .
This graph from The New York Times shows the amount of free press Trump got in comparison to his competitors.
A way people are trying to combat this issue is by limiting the amount of news people are subjected to each day. One company testing this idea out is Theskimm. A subscription based newsletter for women, Theskimm sends readers a briefing of the news in a conversational tone. They keep emails brief and casual using humor and pop culture references to help people understand the news. Some argue that this tone takes away from their legitimacy and makes it difficult to take TheSkimm seriously.
This tweet shows how TheSkimm's tone has been sometimes criticized for it's too lighthearted and belittling manner
Our prediction: More and more news outlets will start coming out with periodic briefings that summarize the news for those too busy or overwhelmed to click on every article. Many companies have already started to try this out. Both BuzzFeed and The New York Times have launched morning news podcasts that act as daily briefings. However podcasts aren’t for everyone. In order to get information that is relevant and up-to-date, users deserve to have a platform that provides a clean layout for updates on the news without overwhelming or pandering to them.
This is where our product, The Point. comes in. The Point. is an app that mimics the format and layout of social media to deliver the news. The Point. exists beyond the typical article format, creating topic pages where all of the news for a topic would live. Updates to news stories are simply added to the existing topic page reducing the amount of unnecessary articles.
Users create profiles and are able to follow or unfollow specific topics.
Pulling inspiration from Instagram’s feed and explore pages, The Point. consists of two main pages. Firstly, a Profile page where users are able to see the updates to stories they follow. Secondly, the Top Stories page, where breaking news and trending topics would be with each post having a bullet-like breakdown of the essential facts of the story.
Our social media-like news feed won’t include repeated information. Without redundant news stories and a clean bullet-point lists of facts, users can focus more on what they want to know.
If users decide to follow a topic, they are alerted when there are updates to the story and can easily find the topic on their profile page. This makes the purpose of push notifications more meaningful; instead of annoying the user, readers will remain consistently engaged with breaking news on their own terms.
With a search option available through the navigation bar, users are able to look back on stories that they followed in the past, as well as stories that they would like to follow that aren't on the Breaking News page.
By maintaining the tone and professionalism of traditional news outlets The Point. has a sense of legitimacy that other, more casual, briefing platforms lack. By pulling inspiration from design and format aspects of social media platforms, we created a way to consume news that seamlessly blends with the reading people are used to and comfortable doing. This product is for the people who want the news and like to be informed but simply don’t have the time to stay updated or feel overwhelmed by the idea of catching up on a topic. With news constantly breaking it can feel impossible to keep up with everything and it can be easy to miss an article. By keeping all of the information of a topic on a single page and using browsing cookies to remember where user’s last left off readers won't have to worry about missing important updates.