United Liberty
Role (Solo): App Design, Design Research, Motion Graphics, UI Design, UX Design
United Liberty is a news/education/research app ideation that I presented as my Senior app project at SPU. The app focuses on human rights issues in China. While the app contains many different features, the core component of the app and the use case displayed will be the “News” and the “Issues” functions.
News
The “News” function of the app sends a push notification to the user on breaking news regarding issues that they’ve affirmed interest in. Upon clicking on the notification, the app opens up all the recent stories regarding the breaking news. It automatically filters to only stories pertaining to the issue. If the user wants to read about other issues, they can manually filter the topics or if they want to read older stories about the same topic, they can scroll past the new stories and hit the “expand feed” button. The reason why I implemented an “expand feed” button rather an endless scroll is because I want the users to be proactively engaging with the app rather than just scrolling through and reading only headlines.
Issues
The “Issues” function is what makes this an education and research app. Users are able to look up overview information about their topics along with resources on where to learn more. The resources usually include Youtube videos and information from organizations who specialize in the issue. Currently, there are three issues available in the prototype: Hong Kong, LGBT Rights, and Uighur Rights. The user is also able to add a topic to their feed which will give them push notifications in the case of breaking news regarding that topic. They are also able to share the page on their social media with the share button. At the end of their feed are news stories that are related to the topic they’re currently reading on. The goal of these pages is to give a quick overview for someone who did not know about these issues beforehand. My user testing heavily influenced my design decisions for these pages. I found that people valued simplicity and credibility the most when researching about these topics. This is why I kept the overview simple but also linked reliable sources for the users who are interested in learning more. I made sure to include a few video sources because I also learned from the user testing that some people prefer to consume their information visually.
