Anirudh Saxena

TASK

Look at www.economictimes.com and create a new design approach for the homepage – desktop.
New design should be
a.Contemporary
b.Easy to navigate and find information
Deliverables
a.Design thinking process document
b.Articulate your design approach
c.High Fidelity Wire-frames

RESEARCH

We started by searching and gathering information about economic times. As it is a popular daily we also gathered information about its readership. During this phase, we used several different tools, such as online research, observations, and data. As we have to work on the Homepage of the Economic Times we also tested the current homepage with various tools so we can get an idea about the underlying problems in terms of usability and navigation.

As per the Indian readership survey the economic times comes in the top five daily newspapers. The readership survey also confirmed that the readership is set to rise as as Internet Continues to see a growth.Which means more readers will be moving on to the digital medium for their daily news consumption.

Thus the homepage needs to cater to the needs of user who would be landing on the site for the first time and would be
expecting a similar experience as he would get while reading the print medium.

 

Before starting with the Empathize phase we ran a few tests to identify the problems with the current design.We began with the heat-map analysis,performance analysis and analyzing the visual metrics which could affect the overall user experience.. On the basis of these tests we identified the areas of
improvement.

Stage 1- Empathize

The pre-research showed us some insights about the Readership of the Economic times and also some issues with the current design of the homepage. We now have the information to ask the right questions to the users and collect information about what they expect out of the Online news consumption portal.

We ran a small survey among few users.

The questions we asked are as follows

Q1: How do you keep yourself updated on all the economic issues ?

Q2: What would you do if you want to know about the current Govt.’s Budget?

Q3: Do you invest your money into the Markets? If yes, how do you make a decision on your investment.?

Q4: Which industry do you work with. How do you keep yourself updated with latest happenings in your industry?

Q5: Tell us about your process of searching for news on the internet.

After the survey results were analyzed we found out that not everyone is interested in the economic or market related issues, but in general people are interested in having knowledge about the current affairs.

We also found out how the users look for the information related to the economy online. Another breakthrough is that we found out the segment of users who regularly visit economic or business news sites to keep themselves updated about the current issues.

Stage 2- Define

After collecting information from the empathize stage we can now create personas for the end users.

Stage 3- Ideate

After defining the user traits & personality information we move on to working on the ideation process.

Stage 4 – Prototype

During the prototype phase it was finally the time to make our ideas come to life.