CNN iReport

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00 Introduction

Background

CNN iReport is a citizen journalism platform within the CNN ecosystem. While users, readers and viewers traditionally just consume content, iReport’s hypothesis is that anyone can tell a story, particularly when they are on the ground and ‘in the field’ within their own life. Unfortunately, the most robust instantiation of iReport is on the website, and on the desktop breakpoint. Citizen journalism is particularly well suited to the ubiquity of mobile phones, so making iReport into a thoughtful mobile experience was our proposal.

 

Process

Myself and another designer created this as a ‘passion project’, working on it in our spare time over a few weeks. We started by interviewing the Editor of iReport and several of her senior producers. We wanted to understand how they viewed the product thus far, what worked, what didn’t, and what blue sky functionality they often thought about at work. We also wanted to gather what the short-term and long-term editorial goals of iReport are. We next spoke to 4 iReporters – 2 who were quite active and posting about 3 times and a month and 2 who were much more sporadic, only posting a couple times a year specifically around destructive weather alerts in their town.

 

Design Direction

Through our interviews, we learned that the main goal of any iReport app should be to create community. The desktop site demonstrated some idea of community, but one that was still fairly rudimentary in terms of functionality. We wanted to that iReport was a vibrant community. We looked to other social media sites for inspiration around functionality. The second goal of our initial proposal was to enhance the storytelling functionality fundamental to iReport. On the CNN site, and within the CNN app, submitting content was clunky and more time-consuming than it needed to be. We wanted to propose a storytelling model that would be delightful to use.

 

01 Proposed Initial Directions/Wireframes

These wireframes are really just initial design explorations. We propose community functionality with the creation of a news feed, more robust profiles and notifications. We also designed a ‘content blocks’ approach to easily uploading content, enhancing storytelling capability and the overall fun factor of participating in iReport.

 

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