The Client

Travis, a Ruby developer who is in love with his RSS feeds, realized every app he tried to use for RSS left him extremely frustrated. As a developer, it took him a while to realize that although feature packed - the problem was the user experience and user interface. When he came to me with this project, I was thrilled! I had already personally experienced this exact same problem with RSS apps a few years back, and I had given up on using them entirely. I took on the UI design portion of the project on an hourly basis.

The Problem

As I mentioned briefly above - RSS apps are just plain bad. Most are over packed with unnecessary features, or too limiting to even be useful. The real problem, however, is that no RSS apps allow a user to simply create their own RSS feed and post new blogs all within the app itself. If Instagram required a user to learn how to develop a website, develop it, then pay for expensive hosting... very few people would have ever decided to use it! So, the problem in a nutshell, is that there is no "Instagram" of long-form content creation. Medium tries to do this, but limits you to only seeing content that is posted on their platform (and most blogs are not on medium). Our goal was to allow a user to follow any RSS feed they want, create their own, and post blogs to their feed... seamlessly from one mobile app.

User Research

I developed 2 User Personas based on my research of active users on similar products (Pinterest, Medium, Wordpress.com users). My preference is always to develop at least 3 unique personas, but to stay within budget we had to limit my hours spent on user research. The first user, Nicole, is our primary target for the application. She is a woman in her late 40's who is very active on the internet but feels limited as to how she can engage. Frustrations include having dozens of bookmarks that get lost in the shuffle in Safari, blogs that she loves but always forgets to keep up with, and the desire to contribute without the technical knowledge to get there.

Proposed Solution

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User Testing

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The Results

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