Brief
Redisigning the Inshorts apps personalization section and bottom app bar in order to create more interactive and engaging experience.
The Problem
Inshorts is a news aggregator app that povides short and crisp news of less than 60 words. While it is widely praised for being one of a kind, the app has been guilty of pushing non curated and overwhelming notifications.
Project Duration
March 22-April22
Role
UX/UI Designer
Tools
Figma, Jitter(Animation)
Insight 1
Insight 3
Insight 2
Insight 4
Research
Secondary
Google Play Store reviews
Irrelevancy for a user is a concern and the app should ensure that only the information needed is incorporated. If there is too much irrelevancy, user engagement will reduce. Remember, you want engagement and interaction, not distraction…
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After going through the play store reviews 60-70% of the issues I found were regarding irrelevancy, notification spamming, personalization and ad-related issues.
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Some key insights from the web
According to a joint study by the BARC and Nielsen India, there has been a 41% increase in time spent on news apps.
Over 50% of app users find push notifications annoying.
35% of push notifications are generic “broadcast” blasts to all users, it’s easy to see that a lack of relevancy plays a major role in this perception.
Receiving between 2 and 5 messages in one week would cause 46% of respondents to disable push notifications. 32% of respondents said they would stop using the app altogether if they received between 6 and 10 messages in a week’s time.
Behavioral Research
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As the frequency of news exposure increases, people gradually perceive news overload, which can lead them to shut down cognitively and deny the necessity of news consumption or to put less effort into acquiring news
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People prefer personalized push notifications
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People consider the news suggested by their friends and family as relevant news
From the secondary research we could understand what the users felt about the news reading and news reading apps, in general.
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And it was clear that most of the users didn't enjoy their news reading experience due to irrelevant news and the notifications of the same being pushed to them everyday .
How much of personalization does current inshorts app provide?
Except for 'choose the language' no other personalization options. NOTHING! NADA!
Research
Primary
After carrying out initial research and getting few insights on how users consume news and their views on news apps I carried out the user interview with few people(10) to get the validation on the initial research
Key insights from the user interviews
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7/10 users found the news on the inshorts app irrelevant. The remaining 3 were okay with the random news and feel that the irrelevancy and random news helps them to discover different news.
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9/10 users found the notifications of the inshorts app overwhelming and disturbing. They felt like they had no control over the app.
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3/10 said that they don't see the notifications/ ignore the notifications of the app and only open the app when they actually feel like reading something.
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The users felt that the ads have been coming up too frequently while reading the news and are being shown in the same format as of the news and said it affects the flow of the news reading
From the user interview it was clear what problems do users actually face. The interview also helped to validate the key findings from the initial research.
So!
How might we solve the relevency issue and provide users only what they desire?
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A catagory personalization screen which wasn't present earlier in the Inshorts app.
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2. Providing trending menu for more trending and updated content. This customization is created keeping the millenials in mind.
​3. Providing users an option of selecting their state for more news that they can relate to.
How might we solve the notification spamming issue?
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An option for the user to select number of articles to be pushed per day.
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How might we possibly increase more user interaction and engagement with the news article ?
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An imrovised bottom bar that provides share, bookmark and react feature.
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Adding react feature would increase user interaction with a particular news article. This would help user express their emotions about that article and have an engaging experience.
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