Developing a digital storytelling tool through design thinking

• Main Author: Teo, Ming Ee
• Other Authors: SHUM Ping
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2020
• Subjects: Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Computer applications::Arts and humanities; Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/140262
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Reading the news is an essential part of our daily life – it enhances our knowledge, motivates us, provides us with solutions, entertains us and raises our awareness of the surroundings. The current news media landscape is characterized by an alarming abundance of information. The age of the Internet and thus digitalization has resulted in newsrooms around the world being increasingly focused on digital media, where editors, journalists and producers face challenges to develop new and compelling ways to optimize digital news delivery and efficiently reach out to their audience in the digital marketplace. The millennial news audience, of age 18 to 34, nowadays rely lesser on traditional media such as newspapers as their primary news source – the rate has plummeted from 36% in 2001 to 22% in 2013. Moreover, with up to 93% of them owning smartphones and 86% of them being active on social media, there is a compelling need to shift their attention to online news media platforms. According to a Forbes report in 2018, the millennial news audience has a dwindling average attention span of 12 seconds. This presents a challenge to create a tool that can entice the millennials to obtain news from online platforms and lengthen their attention span when using these platforms. Past research has tried to improve the quality of media content in various ways to attract millennials. While attempts have been made to interest millennials to read, on both traditional news media and digital media, not many have set out to do so on a targeted approach based on their user needs. The Google Design Sprint is a proven user centric approach to solve problems through designing, modelling, and verifying ideas with users, through a communal vision with distinctly established objectives and deliverables. The student will first investigate on the behavioral patterns of millennials through user surveys and web research. He will then tap on the key principles of Google’s Design Sprint framework for innovation to define a problem statement that is based on millennial users’ needs. This project aims to create a digital news media tool that will cater to the user needs of the millennial news audience, and help them to make digital news media platforms a part of their daily lives.