Echo: The reading chamber.
Echo is a news application that gives the user the ability to see news stories from every different view point. Effortlessly allowing the user to switch from one news outlets take on a story to another. The aim of Echo is to open up people's view points and allow them to see every angle of a story, keeping them informed and out of their usual echo chamber.
I wanted Echo to resemble your regular local newspaper, which is also partly why it's called Echo. After talking with my girlfriend about how it is very easy to read only what you want nowadays, I decided to make the USP of the app, the fact that you can switch between different news outlets to view the same story but from different perspectives.
Initial design concepts
When I initially began to design Echo, I toyed with the idea of giving the user the choice of what outlets they would like to be able to view news from. But after thinking about it, that would almost defeat the point of the app itself because the very nature of someone who was looking to start reading out of their echo chamber, would be that they would have no idea where to start,
Furthermore, I wasn't very happy with the overall design and colour pallettes of the designs seen above, they looked clumsy and I new there would be a much more elegant and efficient way of designing this particular aspect of Echo.
I eventually decided to keep the theme of a local newspaper, which is red, and here are some of the initial concepts I came up with. I really wanted to keep it as simple as possible but yet still let it grab your attention. I eventually settled with my design of creating the effect of layered pages, so that it gave the impression you were opening up a book. I made one last change which was to keep the red, but invert it so that the text was red. I did this to try and keep to the theme of a newspaper even more.
Final Design
I was so pleased witht the way this turned out, it met every expectation I had in terms of its simplicity. In terms of function, you simply get past the loading page and are able to scrolly horizontally through the different stories in one genre, or keep scrolling vertically to find your desired genre. Once you're there you click and the article will open up, and from there you simply use the selection bar at the top to scroll through different news outlets to view the article from their point of view.