The Straits Times (Singapore) Application Redesign

Hello readers! We are team of students from Singapore Polytechnic, studying in Specialist Diploma in User Experience & Digital Product Design.

This is a redesign of an Singapore application named The Straits Times. The app helps locals to keep up with the developments in Singapore and around the world with news and analyses from The Straits Times journalists.

We thank you for your interest in our group project.

Done by: Cherilyn, Darius, Ian, Shazwany

The Straits Times originated from the familiar print format.

The 2 main pain points we felt as the user (the readers) was:

Firstly, the UI of the app by default is the dark background, with bold ‘Headlines’ and big fonts as the landing page, thus lacking visual hierarchy, feeling messy.

Secondly, the app has endless scrolling and is very text-heavy, and it becomes unbearable to read after a while.

Below is a photo to show the current The Straits Times app and recorded many of the main points we felt:

Our target user is a working professional of mid 20s to 30s, who belongs to the millennial generation. They are most likely keeping themselves updated while on the go. Her interests is in how technology is used to help her stay productive, so that it helps her stay on top of her activities.

So for someone like her, she would find the current Straits Times app quite off-putting.

By redesigning a more modernized and more readable version of the app, it would benefit people like Rachel.

Here, we like to highlight her user goals:

Customer current in-app journey:

Here, is what Rachel goes through while using the current app.

She first clicks on the app and logs in. If she is a paid-subscriber, she gets unlimited access.

After logging in, she sees the UI of the app by default is the dark background at present, showing a list of bold ‘Headlines’ and big fonts, which are showing up as the landing page.

She then clicks on the Headline that attracts her, and the news story expands. Once she is done, she can click on another headline and the news will also expand again.

So this means that she is stuck in an endless scrolling, which she finds is not very efficient way of consuming news. And she also gets interrupted by the advertisements she she scrolls down to read the news, which affects her reading experience.

From our user journey map, we understand how Rachel navigate through the current Straits Times, her problems and pains faced. With that, we came to a conclusion of 3 HMW (How Might We), and derived 3 insights and design opportunities based on it.

- HMW enable her to save time.

- HMW reduce frustration when reading with less interruption

- HMW make her feel connected and want to use ST more

The insights we gained were on Time + Clarity , Reader emotions, Personalization.

Then we thought on what we could have improve and work on design opportunities.

1: Efficient browsing and visual clarity for time & clarity

2: Lesser interruptions and showing what the users need to see for Reader’s emotions

3: Ownership & Bookmarks for personalisation / customisation

We each did research and took inspiration from other applications.

We then each do a simple wireframing on the prototype, which was based on the design process on how to categorize information better, which the current ST lacks as the information are messy and hard to differentiate which section.

After the week, we voted on which features or function we want from each others’ prototype.

Red dots = Voted features we liked