When I was onboarded, my team was dealing with an interesting problem. CNN's audio and video experiences exist across different pockets of our website, application, and TV experience. I worked on establishing our core information architectures for our web experiences. These architectures covered the main CNN homepage, the audio experience, the videos page, and miscellaneous sections of audio and video content. Below, I've included an example of what one of these flows looked like. This work is foundational to all our future-facing web work.
Once I had established the existing information architectures, I started designing alternative architectures with the goal of simplifying and most importantly, driving recirculation to the current audio and video experience. I crafted several versions of this - approaching the goal of simplification and recirculation differently in each one.
While I can't talk about the specifics of the work I did on this project due to NDA, I further refined the alternative flows above, and began designing a combo audio and video browsing and navigational experience. Below are some low fidelity wireframes to illustrate the type of work I did.
Special shoutout to my team and the other product design interns for such a fun and engaging time. Here's me with 2 of the other product design interns in our weekly chat!
Designing experiences in the news and media space is interesting because what is best for the user isn't always synonymous with what's best for business. The media space is heavily driven by attention, and as such, it was interesting working through design problems that could balance both.
For example, recirculation could easily lead to predatory design practices but the team was dedicated to providing a better end user experience and as such, we had some interesting design problems to solve.
The team at CNN is so incredibly mission driven, and as someone passionate about the news, I loved working together to create a better digital news experience for people looking for reliable and interesting free news. Thank-you to everyone on the team for your mentorship, guidance, and support. :)
