Kinzen

Media tech start-up Kinzen’s goal was to reinvent our relationship with the news: reimagining and reconfiguring our daily media consumption. The app invited users to create a news routine from community-verified sources, responding to the way they want to understand the world.

I joined Kinzen before its inception and lead the design and research team throughout the initial ideation, planning, production, and launch stages.

During this time I also managed the relationship with the brand agency Workgroup to create the visual identity as well as ensuring product and brand were considered while both were in development.

Role: Design and research lead

Project: Duration: 18 months

Deliverables/activities: Ideation and workshops, user research, market research, early concept testing, user journeys, wireframes and high fidelity design.

The challenge: How can we help people easily access good quality and relevant news to them.

BACKGROUND

In September 2017 I joined founders Mark Little, Aine Kerr and Paul Watson in their new start up Kinzen. Two journalists, two developers and myself came together to design and build tools that would help resolve part of the information crisis.

My time at Kinzen could be divided into three phases. The first was the very early ideation stage, MVP build and concept validation. The second phase was the design of an IOS app which would further help us understand user behaviour as we evolved our backend content extraction/content quality analysis and the third phase would result in the development of our first publisher solution.

This case study will focus our first year and a half, our very early research work up to the design of our first product an IOS news app.

PROBLEMS TO SOLVE

When we came together by mid to end 2017 the information ecosystem was in the middle of huge turmoil. On one hand, we had devious players manipulating and spreading misinformation, influencing elections, algorithms designed to reward poor quality clickbait, and a universally overwhelming sense of lack of control as well as information fatigue.

GOAL

Our goal as a team was to uncover challenges as soon as possible that could potentially fix part of the problem. We would design and build tools that would solve and help readers have a more productive/healthy/quality news experience.

PROCESS

From day one we put the reader at the center of our design process. We discussed internally the concept of designing form the outside in, and we followed through with houndreds of 1to1 interviews and thousands of surveys in two years. A process that would require quick prototyping of ideas, listening and watching to understand where the biggest opportunities for improvement would be.

EARLY WIREFRAMES

Early low fidelity wireframes to help us explore concepts such as channels and playlists, productivity features,
topic, fact check, and complexity controls as well as insights on information diet.

FIRST RESEARCH CONFIRMATIONS

As early as week 11 into the project we created our first low fidelity prototypes and interviewed dozens of readers. The interviews confirmed the universality of the issues we were dealing with. Content noise, overdose of information, lack of a productive news routine, irrelevancy of the information, distrust and lack of control over their experience were only some of the assumptions we were able to validate through research.

THE IDEA

The Kinzen News app idea evolved from the early research that confirmed people wanted a productive news experience that they could trust, where they could focus their content experience based on their identity (Place, Profession, Interests (Topics and Sources) but also a place that would allow them to explore in a trusted environment of quality information.

The app would depend on human intervention as a layer on top of our topic extraction as well as curation with 200 community channels to choose from and 3,500 hand-picked news sources, searchable by topic and location.

THE KINZEN APP

THE NEWSLETTER

CREATING YOUR OWN CHANNELS

Once channels were created readers had the opportunity to control the content that would be surfaced to them. From blocking topics to promoting them, choosing sources or giving Kinzen's editors choice more weight in the ranking we offered a range of parameters that would help adapt channels to readers readers preferences, giving them their control back.

MEANINGFUL FEEDBACK

A concept we explored and built was around the idea of valuable feedback, beyond a clap or a like. Feedback that could help inform publishers about their content and also with future views of collaborative and personalised filtering.

COMMUNITY, EXPLORATION AND DISCOVERY

How to challenge filter bubbles was a key concern. People we interviewed. were worried about not knowing where to go for quality information outside of their regular interests and biases. We wanted to create a place that would help readers discover and explore. We would include emerging topics as well as houndreds of hand-picked and curated channels by people from our community.

“Eilis was responsible for creating the culture that has defined Kinzen. From our small beginnings, she led by example. She was responsible for the emergence of the collaborative, empathetic and creative spirit that is Kinzen's core strength. Eilis quickly established herself as an advocate for the user in our product development process, eventually taking the role of product manager in addition to her work on research and design. Eilis provided leadership for our team as we designed, tested and shipped an ambitious consumer app, demonstrating that very rare combination of people-skills and process-skills. Eilis provided stability and certainty as Kinzen pursued new opportunities in enterprise software. As CEO, I came to depend on Eilis's open, honest and inspired feedback. And her resilient spirit.”

— Mark Little