Flip-side is a Social Media platform that facilitates the engagement of multiple perspectives of a determined topic through high-quality content while encouraging users to develop and share well-informed arguments in order to co-create knowledge.
Goals
Understand the current market around digital media news outlets. Is the competition doing anything to address this trust and transparency problem? How are consumers responding? How can we break into the market and offer a new service that differentiates itself from the market but still satisfies the needs of consumers in a comfortable and familiar way. Gain a deeper understanding of how to build a holistic understanding of a competitive landscape and effectively put together a proposal for a new service offering.
Problem Space
News consumers don’t trust their sources, this causes them to lean more on trusted sources which are people they personally know. The channel they lean on for this interaction is social media. Social media is extremely vulnerable to manipulation and encourages the creation of information bubbles and biased feedback loops. Humans inherently respond emotionally when they don’t understand the context around a given topic.
Opportunity Space
How can we offer a solution that builds trust with consumers, allow them to feel empowered in their news consumption and contribute to the discourse. Media should be encouraging critical thinking within our news consumption, not preying on emotional responses.
Challenges
Consumers are used to news that is constantly updated and has a continuous flow of information. They expect things to update in real time and have grown accustomed to consuming information in quick bites, reacting emotionally. How will they react to a news outlet that tries to slow down the pace at which we consume information and try to make interactions more deliberate instead of just scanning headlines. Can we fight clickbait consumption.
Proposed Solution
Build a website that offers multiple perspectives to a news story effectively combating biased information and allowing consumers to exercise critical thinking and build empathy by understanding multiple view points of a single issue. Be transparent with sources and only source our information from credible outlets. Encourage meaningful discussions to take place around a topic within a news article. Focus on using neutral headlines and not clickbait titles feed on peoples emotional response.
Marketing Strategy
Target Audiences’ Encounters in Current News Services (Current)
Proposed Flip-side Service Encounters (Envisioned)
Flipside’s user engagement process
Re-inquire - engage in a hyper-textual narrative that exposes the user to alternative points of view.
Re-think - encourage the user to build an informed argument which is also detached from emotional drivers.
Re-frame - share ideas to cocreate new knowledge and agreements between users.
Lessons learned
Applied different design and business tools to analyze the current industry and scope an opportunity area
Experienced the dynamic process of diverging and conversing design phases that made the idea marketable and sellable
Unfolded multiple layers of the target markets to validate the idea into service and consolidated business strategies through the insights
Worked under the intensive workload and experienced great collaboration keeping the team diversities shine
