Stories in the news always spark conversations among friends. There are news apps to read articles and social media to share ideas, but there is no platform to engage in an ongoing conversation about a particular article.
Problem
From initial research, almost every person who engages on Facebook, has at some point decided against posting a comment because she or he did not want to engage in a public conversation. The majority of those interviewed showed interest in finding an app that could initiate a private conversation from the articles they read online.
Proposed Solution
Design Convy, a social news app that enables users to have private conversations with friends about published articles.
I agreed to help two developers design the app as a side project with the potential to evolve into a startup. They had completed some customer and user research. I created a story board to visualize the goal of the app.
We brainstormed the features they had in mind and I helped identify the features that should be included at launch. I had a good idea for the structure of the app and created a minimal workflow including user stories to illustrate.
I also experimented with design and interaction patterns from competing news aggregator and conversation apps at the time— Flipboard, Pulse, Prismatic, Zite. Data already existed on usability for these apps, which helped me to organize categories, lists, articles and conversation screens.
I worked on interaction details and content, from hand drawn to more formalized wireframes.
These very rough drafts were my first experiments using the swipe gesture.
These wireframes show the evolution of the interaction between the article, conversation and adding friends to the conversation screens.
I worked on the visual design simultaneously, occasionally mixing in visual design with wireframe mockups.
Article and Conversation Screens
Setup, messaging and interaction experiments