9News
Student Degree Project / University of Waikato / 2014
Designer: Dingzhou Li
URL: dingzhouli.com/9news
9News is basically a news reader app, with function to detect users’ reading preference via geometric shapes and lines, along with extremely intensive consideration of readability and usability.
Nowadays people gain information from social media and news portals. However, social networks only show you what you care about based on your same age/hobby friends. News portals websites like BBC or New Yorks Times focus on showing complete news flow to readers and give them choice to find news that satisfied their needs. A great number of young people, paticulerly teenagers do not have a good enough knowledge system and thrist for history, science and technology in New Zealand.
9News is kind of like a RSS web app without subsribing function, so top news that covers a big range of categories would automitically pushed to readers without any settings. I think the most important thing is to let young people know something is happinging around them, but not let themselves to find out what is important as they do not have such will.
There are 9 different categories displayed in the web app: national, world, business, sports, technology, science, politics, arts and travel. Each category would only involve 1 news article for users to read each day. The only news would be hand picked from a variety of most popular international recognized news portals.
I tried to detect users’ interest and show them the news that they want to read. I believe that basic symbols like simple geometric shapes and lines could represent strong emotions. So I tried using simple symbols to represent the 9 different categories of news. As a result, each category would be represented by a shape which is composed of multiple lines, and each line is rendering of connecting 9 dots. As a result, the final result keeps consistency of both context and visual design.
Since it is hard to interact with the 9 dots on small screen, I present the 9 shapes directly, and create animation to strength the relationship between 9 square dots and shape. Because the square symbol like the logo and the only navigation icon at top right, is a key element throughout my whole project.
At bottom of article, there is a slider to show all news and it could be swiped left or right on touch screen.
Users can always access the automatically hidden fixed bar at top to go back to first page, or view the list of all news.
Overall, I would like to show how I connect users' reading preference and geometrical shapes. I gained the basic idea from <Understanding Comics>, where shows some great examples of relationship between how basic shapes and lines affects emotions. For the interactive part, I tried to combine what I learnt via the reasearch and keep consistency of design style.
Thank you for watching.
Click here to see it in action.
