Pioneering the largest public media collaboration in the U.S., Democracy Now! is a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program hosted by journalists Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez. Democracy Now! is broadcast on a wide range of stations and networks, including NPR, community, and college radio stations, public access, PBS, satellite TV and on the internet.
Democracy Now! is funded entirely through contributions from listeners, viewers, and foundations. They don’t accept advertisers, corporate underwriting, or government funding, which allows them to maintain true independence.
In order to satisfy the public’s increased appetite for independent news, and manage the massive influx of mobile viewers, Democracy Now! set out to streamline their publishing flow and create a more unified reading and viewing experience.
Playing a multidisciplinary role, I worked with stakeholders across the organization to define and execute a UX strategy that emphasized usability, readability and credibility.
Since Democracy Now! has limited editorial resources, it was important to streamline the editorial workflow as much as possible. I achieved this first by working with the team to establish an agreed upon content hierarchy, then by creating a set of responsive content and display patterns that maximized layout flexibility and minimized the effort involved in curating content.
I then created a series of wireframes around key site sections to demonstrate the responsive components in practice.
