Hometown Live Sinclair Digital

Project brief and my role.

When I started at Sinclair Broadcast Group, they had just over 200 local news properties across the United States, each having their own individual news and weather apps managed through many different content management systems. For our company, it was a disjointed creation and consumption experience that didn't work for anyone's benefit--our users or our business. Hometown Live was conceived as is a multiplatform news app that aggregated news stories for users based simply on their location, pulling from all our stations. Our goal was to save millions of dollars by providing a single publishing platform for our creators and a single destination for our users.

Working with senior designer, Jonathan Kersten, and art director, Jim Sharon, I was a UX and visual designer for Hometown Live. Collaborating designers, David Buitrago, Kevin Gangi, Megan Harris, and Mykhaylo Sinenko, on branding and consulting with our partners at Ratio Design on technical challenges, we finished the designs by the time I left Sinclair Broadcast Group in September of 2015. Downloadable at a later date at HometownLive.com.

Framing our problem and goal.

At its core, the question we needed to answer was how can we get more eyes on our content? Meaning (1) how do we reach more people with our content and (2) how do we get people who already follow our content to consume more of it?

  1. Our audience was becoming more mobile, consuming content on the go. We needed to tap into this market to empower our current readers and reach new readers.
  2. Social media, especially Facebook, is an undeniable driving force in viewership. We needed leverage social if we’re going to reach more people.
  3. Interesting stories are interesting stories and shouldn’t be prescribed by geographic location. Taking full advantage of our more than 200 stations nationwide, we can deliver original stories that no one else can.

Our solution was to create a Sinclair news mobile app, focusing on original content and leveraging opportunities for social experiences.

Leveraging social.

How can social (1) get our users to read a story, (2) share a story, and (3) interact with a story?

  1. Social proof stories. Let users know this is a story that they might want to read because either (1) their friends read and reacted to it or (2) many people read and reacted to it.
  2. Enable sharing opportunities at every level. Stories shared to social media either (1) open the story in app if the user has Hometown Live installed or (2) link to web viewable versions for mobile or desktop.
  3. Reactions to stories are easy, frictionless ways for users to engage and contribute to a story. It will also inform readers what they should expect.
Experience Map
High Level Flow

Personas.

We designed for (1) natives who cared for news about their city and (2) transplants who cared for news about the city they resided in and their city of origin based on the demographics of our audience from analytics.

Key user flows.

Prototyping.

Invision was a great tool for testing and demoing user flows and information architecture:

  1. Wireframe 1 click through.
  2. Wireframe 2 click through.
  3. Wireframe 3 click through.
  4. Onboarding with in progress visual design.
  5. Final golden path with final visuals.

Whereas Framer, getting down to the fine details, was great for demoing certain microinteractions:

  1. Diving in to a category at the end of a carousel.
  2. Switching between multiple cities.
Onboarding screens.
Key app screens including home, a news section, a story, feed selection, and settings.
Stories in browser for desktop and mobile.

The brand challenge: Juxtapose the vision of hometown with our largely bleak content.

Crime made up the majority of the stories on our stations. The challenge was to deliver a brand that both represented the wholesomeness of the hometown and bleakness of our content.

Our moodboard represented locality, city life, history, and our busy lives.

Our brand built itself on the image of out of focus city lights. It was abstract which worked well for our nationwide presence. It represented city life and was dark, which fit our demographic and bleak content.

Style guide.

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