This problem was identified before I joined the company. Basically, through internal data analysis, there was a deficiency in how users read news. They would read publications received via SMS as of 2017, giving all the visibility to the partner.

news consumed monthly by Claro users via SMS.

Prototype password: Cn75395123

Objective: Align Claro Notícias’ evolution with the company’s strategies. Current and future business ideas, the company’s political and strategic vision, the product’s calling, and goals/metrics to ensure product success.

Questions asked:

1. How do you define your role in this product?

2. How would you describe Claro Notícias? What is this product?

3. How does this product fit into the company’s product portfolio?

4. Who are the biggest competitors for this product, and what are the company’s concerns regarding them?

5. Who is this product for?

6. Who does your area expect to be the product’s user in 1 to 2 years?

7. What is your area’s biggest concern with Claro Notícias? What would be the worst thing that could happen?

8. What are the business expectations for this product?

9. How do you think this product could be differentiated?

10. What would you define as success for this product?

11. How do you believe we could improve our customer’s experience on our platform?

All interviews were conducted by myself and 1 observer Designer. They were recorded and documented in Notion, with responses categorized and affinity mapping performed.

The interviews revealed a misalignment in the understanding and goal of the product across teams. The quotes below were some interesting responses from people in various roles involved in the project, such as the CEO, Marketing Director, Business Analysts, and Customer Support.

“Interactive content hub”

“A product with multiple features”

“…has features that help users during their usage”

“…distributing information in various formats”

“Has a range of personalization options”

“Low ARPU audience. The mass with the most restricted access to news.”

“We have content for all audiences.”

“…reaching a level of excellence”

“Navigation and democratic content delivery. Whether through algorithm or navigation.”

“working with multimedia aspects of news”

“quick news, gossip… Simpler content consumed on Instagram and Facebook for sharing.”

“…prioritization and categorization […] execution of CRM, big data, and machine learning.”

“I believe in the business model. If we reach a good level of technology and usability, we’ll become one of the top names in the market.”

This is a part of the creation process I never skip — it’s fast and cheap to change direction. In the images, you can see where I start thinking about sub-editorials and comment boxes, for example.

User reviews were always checked by me, but unfortunately the final rating was meaningless — during the app launch, employees were encouraged to rate 5 stars. Yeah. 🙁

Knowing this, we can look at the genuine user reviews and the way the customer support kept repeating its response.

I did a brief research on Similar Web to gather more market data, and that’s where a major Desk Research began.

This time, I sought to understand this leaderboard of news and magazine websites. Many of them we already considered our direct and indirect competitors.

To complete this research, it was more than necessary to look globally at this market, since product internationalization was a major company objective.

I easily visited nearly 100 news websites across the globe.

Here the goal was also to map opportunities, strengths, and weaknesses of apps in the market.

Everything I had imagined for this architecture I put on paper to quickly explain it to my team. The strengths and weaknesses of all those products were boiling as opportunities to be built on. Essentially 100% of the architecture needed to be redone, but I knew exactly how to slice this solution into phases.

This was my last delivery at the company. Unfortunately, I couldn’t follow through with this reformulation. But the presentation was made to leadership and, with approval granted, the next step would be to break it down and slice it into smaller deliveries.

Access the link below to check out the document.

I would probably meet with my PM, Devs, Projects Team, and QA to present the proposal, identifying potential barriers in what I had designed.

Then, I’d create a Value vs. Effort matrix, validating with these other individuals how complex it would be to implement the deliveries.

Depending on the outcome, I’d be able to reduce scope or adapt it to a context that would ease feature delivery, and over time we’d adjust to reach what was originally planned.

With many new behaviors proposed in this new version, we’d need research processes embedded in our daily routine.

In nearly 2 years at the company, I learned to mediate conversations between teams whose relationships were strained, avoiding harm to project progress.

I learned to develop interfaces based on heuristics to ensure at least a minimum of grounding, even when working outside of user-centered design.

I also learned to adapt and execute certain processes very quickly, such as remote unmoderated usability tests, which allowed me to keep working while still iterating with users.