Designing for News and Media

As a Product Design intern at CNN, I focused on establishing core audio and video experience information architectures, creating new flows, and designing new hybrid audio and video news experiences.

My Role

Product Design Intern

My Team

Jane Irwin — Manager, Director of Product Design (Audio and Video)
Lindsay Westcott — Staff Product Designer, Mentor
Matt Weldon — Staff Product Designer
Michele Feldmann — Staff Product Designer
Jamus Andrest — Designer
Nichole Pesaru — Visual Designer
Nathan Portlock — Product Strategy
Meaghan Kimball — Product Manager
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Duration

5 months (January - May 2023)

TLDR

During my time as a Product Design Intern on the CNN Audio and Video (AV Club) team, I worked on auditing and establishing foundational information architectures of the current audio and video web experience. Based on this I identified new opportunities for a hybrid audio and video navigational experience and explored alternative information architectures which I designed from low to high fidelity.

Some design initiatives I led

Establishing Web Information Architectures
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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.

Alternative Web Architectures
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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.

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Me with 2 of the other product design interns in our weekly chat :)

REFLECTION

Designing in an Attention-Driven Industry

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.

Hey there! 🥸

Due to privacy concerns, I can't share this work in it's entirety publicly. If you would like to see this work in more detail please feel free to reach out to me at 97chaeeun@gmail.com. :)

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