Scoop - A citizen journalist’s best friend

Introduction

With users being prone to using sites such as Twitter or Facebook to express their opinions, specifically, people tend to tweet or live stream when news is breaking — like if they witness an accident, a fire, a fight, a police chase, or something else of a more urgent and distressing nature.

Meanwhile, if they’re trying to promote a local event — like a book signing, to use an example — it’s likely that they’ll post that to the business’s Facebook Page, where it can then be discovered through the Page’s fans and surfaced in Facebook’s Local app.

Defining the key pain points

With so many social networks where people share their little stories as citizen journalists sparking the right change in society, the larger scale impact that could be further delivered goes missing due to the sheer number of networks and a large amount of other content on the social networks.

Reporting local news to communities that don’t have adequate local news coverage — or had a local news outlet close shop. It’s little secret that many smaller news outlets are struggling and searching for financial viability. Very few organizations have the robust subscription cash streams of media giants like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. (In contrast to President Trump’s repeated statements about “the failing New York Times,” the publication reported in November 2017 that its digital subscription base continues to increase, to some 2.5 million subscribers.).

Lastly, shrinking media, is a national problem. According to statistics from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported by the Columbia Journalism Review, jobs in media have dropped dramatically, by 411,800 people in 2001 to 173,709 in 2016.

So we have two key pain points to solve during this challenge:

• Larger scale impact that could be further delivered goes missing due to the sheer number of networks and a large amount of other content on the social networks.
• Reporting local news to communities that don’t have adequate local news coverage.

Execution: Design

Scoop encourages local journalists and everyday folk to capture a video, take a snapshot and build a story around events wherever they happen. You can add/edit your story at any time so you are not limited to only a single time-frame but rather have a series of evolving stories.

As a solution to create an easy-to-use app experience while uploading stories, which looks good on every mobile device, I created a floating menu at the bottom of the screen for users to easily add stories.

This fixed positioned floating menu bar is always reachable with one hand either the user is right or left handed. In order to create a solution, which cannot be affected by rounded screen corners or overlapping Home screen indicators, I decided to go with a full width navigation instead centred button. I positioned this quick menu bar near the bottom of the screen, but not too close to the edges. This way it’s comfortable to reach and not affected by overlapping UI elements or rounded screen corners.

After tapping on the floating menu button, the user gains full access to the the three ways to add stories i.e. photos, videos and texts.

To encourage engagement amongst users while uploading content, I introduce a new feature called ‘contributions’. Once a user creates their story, he/she will be prompted to publish the content as public or private. Under public stories, other users will have the chance to add their thoughts in the form of pictures, text or videos. This will be ideal for large scale events that cannot be physically covered by one person. It will also encourage users to be truthful with their content as other users are constantly curating the stories.

Execution: Prototyping

During the prototyping process, my goal was to create an interaction, which is quick, short and responsive, while making sure that it’s feasible from a developer point of view as well.