Product Vigilante

ABC NEWS APP

Product Vigilante is an initiative we run where we play around with ways to improve other people’s products and services.

As a part of this initiative we look for products and services that we use, believe in and are passionate about.

We then explore various ways to improve them and if we mange to come up with something interesting, we throw some hours behind it (usually about a day or two).

the abc news app

Like most people, it is important for us to follow the news and stay up to date with what is happening around the world and like most Australians, ABC News is one of the key places where we get our news from.

However, unlike most people, being product designers, once we see a way to improve a product, we cannot un-see it; and then after some time, we find it very hard to stop ourselves from trying to give it ago.

Such was the case with our experience with the ABC News app. It has been a while now that we have been talking about ways in which it could be improved, simplified and made better. Finally, we got a moment to put some of our ideas to the page.

The following project was put together over the period of about a day. We came together, shared some thoughts and got to work. The result was (what we think to be) a simpler, more desirable product.

The final result

For those of you who want to jump right to the end, the following prototype is what we ended up with.

While we have embedded the prototype below we do recommend opening it in a new window (best viewed in desktop view).

It is also of value to open up the ABC News app alongside (on your phone) so that you could compare and contrast the two.

https://xd.adobe.com/view/c3f93173-e89e-442a-909a-126cf66a0b02-96aa/?fullscreen&hints=on

how we got there

For those of you who want to understand what was done and how we got from the current product to our new version, the following section is for you.