CovidWire was a self initiated project started in April, with the aim of delivering high quality summarized news related to Covid 19 to the average Indian in their own language, in a quickly shareable format. Within a few weeks, we expanded our reach to include volunteers to help curate, summarize and translate news articles. The project also received media coverage

View the product live at covidwire.in

The web app is optimised for mobile view.

We designed and built a progressive web app in an agile development model and distributed news pieces processed by our volunteers to our 2000+ daily users.

Since we had over 100 volunteers working to produce content, we needed to find a way to efficiently hande the creation and flow of curated content. For this, we utilized low code solutions to create a responsive environment for the management platform.

A few weeks after the world became home-ridden because of Covid, another plague started creeping into homes - misinformation regarding Covid. In the advent of fake news, whatsapp forwards and language barriers, we started observing a few trends in the way Covid news was presented, consumed and understood. We further had conversations with our frieds and family to further understand this space. From these talks, we got a few insights into the problems that currently existed in the news delivery space

Instead of taking an academic approach with user interview, affinity mapping and personas, we aimed for a more organic process which was agile and responsive.

We talked to adults of age 25 to 65, who were our target demographic. Instead of structed interviews, we had multiple casual chats to deeply understand the various factors involved in the consumer behavior of the news reading.

Of the multiple issues we identified, we focused on 5 of them, which later became the guiding principles of CovidWire.

Our process to design the application was iterative in nature. During every release, we would redesign certain aspects to accomodate new requirements and remove shortcomings of the existing design. At all points, we tried to keep the UX simple and familiar as most of our target demographic were emergent users. To better understand how to design the final flow of news consumption in our application, we first built a beta version to test out the core features.

We gathered insights from volunteers and beta users regarding the webapp, to set out for designing the first version. Some key learnings from beta run:

- Feed becomes monotonous with no visual difference between news cards
- Information architecture gets complex quickly when introducing filters (domains, regions)
- Region switch happened rarely where as language switch happened frequently
- 12 News/session was the average read rate
- Certain news stories can be conveyes with just headlines
- Utility functions like bookmark, feedback and search were desired
- Familier design patterns, similar to the ones on social media apps are the most effective for emergent users

These are the chosen and designed style components that build up the application and give it a consistent look and feel.

Based on the information architecture and the content needs for each screen, we tried drawing up wireframes. The app has two major informational components. First is the news feed, where all the curated news cards would be populated, and the second is the news card itself, where the news summaries and metadata are organised

Based on the information architecture, and blueprints, over a few iterations, built up the final componenets that made up the application

CovidWire was launched on April 22, after 3 weeks of planning and beta run. We saw a steady growth in our user numbers and we tweaked the content output based on the immediate feedback we recieved from our users. We were featured in few news papers and TV channels which further boosted our adoption rate.

By August, we had worked on quite a number of articles and had a strong user base, who were actively sharing the news summaries on WhatsApp.

Between late July and early August, we started to notice a drop in the usage numbers. Interestingly, we also found a similar drop around the same time across other COVID19 related websites. This indicated a bigger trend of information fatigue setting in and people getting back to their normal lives and schools and colleges restarting

We had our last day on August 31st as we figured that the user numbers are unlikely to rise again. After a 5 month run, we had a fair emount of impact in our immediate circles and created a lovely community. We have plans to rethink CovidWire and its philosophy for other issues in a much larger scheme.