After reading the article on Ketla and India’s smartphone users, I decided to create a News mobile app named NewsNow that gives users the ability to read recent news that pertains to them. To make a simple and easy-to-use homepage, I designed this mobile homepage with features that this target population will recognize. As documented in Statista.com, around 78% of smartphone users are Android users; therefore, I decided to use specific symbols that are commonly used in the Android OS to make the user more comfortable using the product. The product is supposed to be engaging to users due to its simplicity and ease of use, which may cause customers to switch to this mobile site instead of the more complicated, hard to use sites. The mobile site also uses familiar logos and symbols that the earliest versions of Android, such as cupcake, utilized in order to make the user experience more intuitive. The simplicity and ease of use of the site will hopefully cause users to switch to this product.
After clicking on an article or on its picture, users will be able to read the articles in a comic strip-like manner with pictures that tell the story or get the message across. For example, I decided to create a news strip on how to take care of you diabetes.
The home page is designed to hold only the title, pictures of the article (including any text), a search bar to search within the site, and a menu page icon on the upper left (the 3 vertical bars). The articles displayed on the homepage will be be a collection of the most viewed news articles at the moment, and users can simply swipe down to view more articles, click on an article to read/view it, or click the menu widget on the left for more options. When clicked, the menu icon will prompt a menu fly-out that will give the user options to select news of interest such as Global news, Local news, Health, and Sports. Intuitive icons are also placed near the respective news to gently guide the user. After clicking on the perspective news type, they will be guided to a collage-like list of pictures/titles of article for them to read (similar to the original homepage).
The article picture utilizes a simple icon that hopefully conveys how to live a good life while also living with diabetes. The rest of the article contains intuitive pictures and text to convey to a reader how to take care of their diabetes. The user can swipe down to view more about the story (as indicated by the down arrow on the article). Users can also click on a certain image to enlarge both the image and text, and click anywhere outside the image to return to the normal article view. At the end of the article, there is a link to the next article along with an arrow sign, to indicate that pressing on that link would lead to the next article.
Sources: Balsamiq template for smartphones (Balsamiq.com)
Icons: http://www.iconarchive.com/show/medical-health-icons-by-graphicloads.html
http://www.iconarchive.com/search?q=diabetes
http://www.iconarchive.com/search?q=exercise
http://www.iconarchive.com/search?q=health
https://www.dreamstime.com/royalty-free-stock-photos-food-icons-image18800278
https://www.dreamstime.com/stock-photo-fast-food-icons-isolated-white-image33297640
