How to use design thinking to build media products that people want
It is really important to have a relationship between storytelling and design as people need stories to understand how the product relates to them, according to Juliana Proserpio at Echos.
Takeaways
Echos is a design lab that works across Sao Paulo, Lisbon, Rio De Janeiro, and Sydney.
Echos co-founder Juliana Proserpio says newsrooms need to go beyond their focus on content strategies and get to the magic point of becoming user-centric.
User experience and user interface are the details that make users fall in love with your product.
Context
Newsrooms and industry cannot dictate how audiences engage with their content. Instead, users determine if they want the news and how, thereby spotlighting the role of user engagement when it comes to designing products, says Echos co-founder Juliana Proserpio.
Together with Google News Initiative, Proserpio worked on creating a design accelerator playbook for Asia-Pacific based newsrooms and worked with organizations including India Today, Turkbox, and Malaysiakini. The goal was to help them understand design thinking as a process in building products and accelerate their digital offerings.
Bringing design thinking into your product or newsroom simply means becoming audience-centric. It also allows more collaborations, experimentations with the product format and increases value for consumers.
Tips for embedding design thinking in newsrooms
Know and engage with your user. Interview users, invite them to participate in your product’s creation and evolution.
Content isn’t your only product. Focus on going beyond content and be user centric. User centric approach includes user engagement, user experience, user participation, and format.
Brutal prioritization. Cut everything else out and focus on your product’s anchor. But don’t kill what makes your product delightful in the first place. Maintaining a balance is crucial in design thinking.
Focus on building a minimum delightful product (and not just a viable one). Focus on user experience and user interface and let them fall in love with your product. Think about maturity of the market and engage with users to create a memorable product.
Build a north star for your product and constantly evolve it. Write a future-oriented press release about the product to identify and narrow your goals. Test your product and continue to evolve using user feedback even after launch.
Additional tips
Newsrooms need someone experienced to engage in a time-effective design process. If a manager is learning and applying skills into design thinking at the same time, chances are they will fail since the entire process can be overwhelming.
The process fails when managers lack design process experience to direct a project.
For newsletters wanting feedback from users, seek one-on-one interviews, survey responses and go for quality and not quantity.
Have a button in your email newsletter for user feedback.
With a rough prototype, be open to failure when seeking feedback from users while building a product — it’s cheaper than building something that no one wants.