Belo Customer Insights

For this project we chose our persona based on someone one of us knew. Allen Davis is 30 years old and currently lives in Portland, Oregon. He is the restaurant/bar owner of Produce Row Café as well as an entrepreneur. He is super ambitious so Allen spends most of his day focusing on his work and how to improve it. However, with his busy lifestyle, Allen still cares about what is happening around him and spends whatever free time he has looking at local news on his phone. We chose him as our persona because he fit in the age range and we felt like he was an excellent representation of the target segment BELO should be focusing on.

As Kathy mentioned earlier, laptop ranked the highest for method used to access news. With that in mind, we wanted to create a solution that can incorporate both convenience and usability to make it a necessity for users. We created a website that contained all the news topics that our participants use local news sources for. As you can see here, our home page includes topics such as: sports, entertainment, transportation, weather, and crime. Instead of trying to cover the same stories as national news providers, we decided to focus more in depth on the content that people used local news providers for. On the side here we included links to those popular national news providers to emphasize to users that you don't have to choose one or the other but instead can use both together. We also have the option for users to sign in via popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Gmail, and Twitter to allow sharing stories and customizing accounts.

In addition to all those topics, our main feature is the listening option on our news articles. With one click of the mouse, users will be able to listen to the stories being read aloud instead of reading the articles themselves. This allows more convenience as users can just listen to sports cover, events highlights, or crime stories while taking care of other tasks. With these options, users can also link feeds to stories that they want to share. Also, with one click of a button, users can add specific events from the news to a calendar which Katrina will talk more about.

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