Idea Progression Iterations

Idea/Iteration 1:

The initial idea which the team had planned to be developed was selected from a pool of all the ideas students had come up with in the class. It was aiming to answer the question of ‘ How might we make the news more quickly accessible and easily consumable for mobile users on the go who just want a quick update?’. It was inspired by a number of other applications out there which were not specifically in the journalism space like Snapchat and Soundcloud. It would allow users to quickly swipe through short news videos with the ability to like or dislike videos to influence content displayed to them in the future.

The original poster of the idea can be seen below:

Very quickly the team realised that although the concept seemed promising, there were a number of aspects in the idea which when considered further did not appear to be feasible or logical given the audience we were aiming for. We decided that the idea was too similar to other applications and did not offer anything exciting, new or innovative in the space of news, it was more of a response to problems with other applications rather than a new idea of our own.

Pros:

• Combines the best features of a number of apps into one
• Fast delivery platform
• Includes a social aspect (timed comments)

Cons:

• Not very innovative
• Doesn’t give users much reason to convert from existing applications

Ultimately, we learned a lot from this first iteration, primarily in the form of getting a clearer understanding of the demographics, use cases, and motivations which we were attempting to target. We also gave ourselves a bit of a push to come up with a better idea building on the pros of this first idea.

Idea/Iteration 2:

The second iteration of our idea still had a lot of features carried over from the first version, but we decided to design our application to focus on a different target audience, commuters. We all had expressed observations we had made about our own habits and the habits of those around us on our daily trips to uni, and found that a lot of people were spending their time browsing news. We realised that most people will make the same commute to and from work every day, meaning that they always have a specific amount of time in their day with which we could target our app. This element of time was particularly important for us, so we decided to work in an option to select the amount of time you had and let the app build the playlist of videos around that.

Below you can see a few examples of brainstorming and initial mock ups:

Pros:

• Effective in targeting commuters
• Provides a lot of benefits to the users, making it tempting for them to switch to our app
• Very personalised content delivered to users when they want it

Cons:

• Not particularly social, lacking much potential to expand into that space
• Difficult concept to get right, people are very particular about their news

Moving forward, we decided that pursuing the commuter market was our best opportunity, and one which could be fairly easily tapped into. There are a lot of competitors in the form of news aggregators, especially personalised ones, but nothing that captivated the video news market. We still had a number of things to work out in terms of incorporating a social aspect into this idea, but it presented itself as the strongest one moving forward.

Idea/Iteration 3:

A smaller iteration on the previous idea came in the form of an attempt to expand our target audience to commuters who drive to work daily. We figured that we could deliver similar content to these users in a hands free audio version, and still largely achieve the same effect. The user interface would need to be very different as we would not want to encourage people to be tapping and swiping on their phones whilst driving, however, we saw a simple solution to this in using an audio driven version of the application. Potentially including voice or bluetooth controls, users would be able to substitute listening to the news on the radio for listening to a curated playlist of the latest news delivered directly to their phone.

Pros:

• Provides a great option for commuters who drive to work (significant portion of the population)
• Expands the target audience to more potential customers

Cons:

• A lot of the videos we had expected to be included in the news delivered by the app are primarily driven by their visual content, making it a confusing experience to listen to
• Potentially stretching the target audience too wide

Idea/Iteration 4:

The next iteration of Bulletin involved a feature called the curated lists. This iteration was born out of feedback from the tutors saying that Bulletin lacked social capabilities. Our answer to this critique was to further develop the idea of saving a news story and have that turn into a list of stories that can be shared and involved with other users playlists. After doing some research we found that people did in fact enjoy learning and understanding what news their friends are viewing.

Pros:

• Provides way for people to share what they are viewing with their friends
• Ways to see add stories that your friends are viewing
• Implemented with social media logins to make it easy for users to start and find their friends.

Cons:

• Detracts from the original idea and draws attention away from the category system
• Very hard to market as comparisons can be drawn to social media feeds