Project Overview
A how-to Politics App to make people more aware of the to-do and the general goings of the country and its policies. A platform to get their daily dose of the latest, most important Political developments delivered in plain formats making Politics more accessible and unbiased, by giving out plain simple facts of things happening in current political happenings (parliament), not daily news.
My Role
This was a personal project, done in a span of 5 days. It explains the process of problem thinking, research and ideating, to curate a simple and effective place for Indian political news, which is so handholding and intuitive that it becomes a part of everyday activity.
Chapter 1: Discovery 💡
After the covid wave hit and settled down by the end of 2020, suddenly Indian Market and Technology saw a bombardment in the finance & investment sector and how information was overflowing. Talking about Zerodha, Upstox, Groww, coming down to the UPI transactions from Paytm, Bharatpe, and some payment gateways like Razorpay. Ranging from youth to elderly people, everyone was talking about Stock markets, Mutual funds, Investments and what not about money. Not only that but if we talk about the Twitter world either people were also crazy about NFT’s or Web 3.0 and our dear Metaverse.
Meanwhile, I’ve been intrigued by all this. But I always have been a keen watcher/listener of the topics of the country in general, current affairs, politics and social news. Eventually, I was keen on reading up and closely watching some of the bizarre acts happening in the country. Quite some sources to grab insights, I take to every day was Newslaundry, Lallantop, WION on Youtube primarily as a video-audio source. Then came the next wave of our dear covid, Wave 3 which wasn’t severe but existed. And I had a conversation with my friend over covid, who mentioned that as the elections are approaching nothing is likely to be close anymore. 🤭🤫 Haha! True that. Seeing crowd in elections COVID be like, better be moving in some other place dude.
That time I had a Bulb toon 💡 in my head, why don't people talk much about elections? Then I sat to jot down my idea, why not discuss Politics in youth? And here came the idea to have a how-to politics app. To design a product that I wish I would have had in past years—a political reference app.
Brief Idea → “To have a daily Newsletter to update people about happening of real-time Politics and Public Policies undergoing.”
Few constraints were laid out for easy understanding as well-
- This isn’t a news application eg. Inshorts, Lallantop, ANI etc, where who said what would be documented.
- A product, which makes political scenarios easy not provide news.
- Needs to be intuitive as a source of education and which becomes a part of knowledge access and source.
Chapter 2: Define
I decided to lay down a roadmap that would help streamline the process of finding solutions, which would essentially cover all aspects of my problem.
To start with, after identifying the problem I tried to map it down, I decided to deep down and see what are the possible ways to cater and how has it been catered.
I started off at the most important juncture, the users. I decided to go ahead with conducting and get a hang of the user base and current sources of information.
Eventually, I started looking up the various resources, which provide quality content about the current political scenes and how is it manifested. Focusing on the particulars, in different sources of the medium, video, audio, visual etc. but about knowledge and educating the users.
▷ What? Does something already exist?
#SansadWatch is a weekly roundup by Newslaundry, where they talk and present information about what the government is doing. “We keep a watch on the parliament and everything around it so you don't have to.” - Newslaundry
Knappily is a news analysis app that gives a 360-degree analysis view of current affairs and features politics, sports, business, technology, and philosophy topics. They target the topics by answering the 5Ws and 1H.
#Sansadmeaaj is a daily show by Lallantop, where they describe the various happening and the important bills passed out or presented in the parliament during the working sessions.
All things Policy is all you'll need to understand the world (and appreciate your breakfast) better. It breaks down complex economic and geopolitical ideas through the lens of current events.
I tried to lay down the various other apps that are a part of people’s lives, through a small survey and by talking to people if some kind of information-driven app is in their minds.
▷ Where? Similar formats, where educative and informative content is the source?
We have some repository apps by the Government of India
Thus, after all this analysis I realised that people do tend to seek certain types of products, where they get easy access to the cumulative amount of information needed, as to they don’t have to search 10 different links.
Also, see the research I did for a background understanding of the topic and how things work.
Political and the Indian Scenarios →
After all the analysis it was laid out that to have a platform where one can go and get a brief and detailed description of the current highlighted topics and thus things are under the knowledge of the individual.
▷ How? Analysis of Problem Statement to define it.
Thus next step is to define the User group to focus on how to make it intuitive and hold the users.
An exciting challenge to make a dense amount of information understandable, to design intuitive access to all the information, and to also try to bring a measure of cheer to an otherwise heavy subject matter. Don’t mix up this with some other news providing the app, it’s about the Public and for the betterment. Like Lincoln said, “ For the People”.
Chapter 3: Identify
User Research
I conducted various conversational talks with different segments of people to get an understanding of their political interests and general information gathering area, based on the above questions. After a deep-down analysis, I found that -
Insights
① To know about current happenings, People tend to read the news. This is achieved in either on paper format or digitally.
② To deep dive into some particular segment that interests them, people tend to search online and read various sources of information available.
③ People tend to get a brief summary of the new amendments and bills passed in the parliament through new websites, articles and podcasts.
Chapter 4: Ideation
The main requirement was to make sure that the product creates a source-knowledge gathering base experience that helps users to understand better the political scenarios, to make better decisions and to interact more as adults.
Brainstorm to think about the various types of features to have in the app, depending upon the pain points
Chapter 5: Explore
To define the visual UI Screens based on the various iterations of features.
