Today in class we explored doing paper prototypes and talked about the LATCH methodology for sorting information. We started by looking at doing paper sorting of articles base on what category we felt they'd come under, and then sorting the articles into their respective categories. From there we explored the concept of LATCH organization for displaying data. LATCH is the idea that data can be sorted & displayed 5 different key ways – Location, Alphabetically, Time, Category, and Hierarchy. Since as a class we all explored the idea behind categorical organization, we each had to come up with an interface to display news articles based on the other ones. My group got alphabetical sorting, which I initially dismissed as easy & boring to do, since it would just be an alphabetical list. But Awa said to us let's think of it a different way, what if each letter of the alphabet was arranged in a circle, and you could scrub through each letter like an original iPod click wheel? I thought that was a pretty awesome idea, but there needed to also be a visual indication of the article up the top, rather than just when you let go – so that you can truly scrub through the articles.

Afterwards, we had some time in class to start doing some paper prototypes of potential ideas for our website, and after talking to friends and family about an idea I had, I decided to try out the interface for it. My idea is based around the idea of being able to see news location based. Sometimes I really just want to see Wellington news, and sometimes I want to see world news – heck I even want to see news based on my suburb if that was possible. So I had the idea of being able to zoom in and out on your current location to filter news stories based on where they are. So for example if I was zoomed into Kelburn, I would get posts (like tweets) of people in Kelburn, and when I zoomed all the way out I could see world news. After telling my parents about the concept they really liked it because they're considering moving to the Hawke's Bay in a couple years and told me they have a really hard time getting aggregated news from the Hawke's Bay. Below are the concepts I came up with for the UI.

The first screen would show you the top 5 stories im your location – and these top 5 stories would be the same for everyone across the location, not based on an algorithm because I feel like that just allows people to live in their news bubbles, and I resonated with the idea behind newspapers being something where everyone sees a single incident on the front page and can talk about what happened – everyone knows about it. From there you can click on a story, but rather than showing you an article, it shows you an aggregation of all of the articles written about an incident, so you can read different information based on the news outlet to get the whole story. This page would also include any important tweets or videos because I really enjoy being able to hear what people are saying about a specific story. That's why I mostly use twitter or reddit for my news, because I really enjoy seeing what people are saying, and the back and forth between someone who has an opposing view.

I also had the idea of doing a 'read, watch, or listen' approach to the app, where you could click a tab at the bottom and quickly jump to the top videos of the day, or top radio stations/snippets. It would be great if there was some way to have consistency between the tabs, so that the top 5 stories are always the same, but just the media changes. A good use case of this would be my mom who current uses an app called haystack news. While she cooks she sometimes plays the app in the background, which basically plays the top news videos of the day, from all different sources. If she doesn't want to keep listening to a video she can swipe to go to the next one. I really like this and definitely want to incorporate this into my website because a lot of people digest the news while they're doing something else, and not everyone has time to be reading articles.

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The other idea I had was similar, but based around the idea of instagram stories UI, where you could read a story in chunks. One page could be one paragraph of an article, and you can tap back and forth to flick between paragraphs, and swipe to skip the story. I talked to my girlfriend's friend who current gets her news this way by following an account called 'shityoushouldcareabout' on instagram – which is basically a news outlet covering stuff teenagers should know. I think this is a great way of getting people engaged with the news, but it would be great if you could also read comments about what others think, rather than just the instagram page.

This was a long post. I know, my bad. I just wanted to get everything in my brain out.