Pheed — news journalism app

Pheed was a platform for content creation, that invited everyone to become journalists and be paid for their efforts. Content creators could easily upload their text, photos and videos, and get help from professional editors to create meaningful stories (which was a super unique twist then and now). I owned the whole design experience end to end on this small but ambitious team.

Featured in Behance.
Year 2015

The problems —
The news is out there; from eyewitness, to personal stories, traditional news and social media. Mass media does not have reporters everywhere, all the time.
There is no relationship between the unprofessional creators and the professional media.
The publishers are getting the money; creators usually don’t get paid.
People have no suitable platform for writing journalistic content that goes further than the content they write on social networks.
Our solution — a mobile first news app that combines crowdsourced content with professional editing, creating a diverse newsroom where the individual creators get paid and gain recognition.
Consumption interface — looking around at competitors, we knew it was important to provide consumers with a personalized news feed tailored to their consumption patterns.

The feed view showed cards of articles in a scroll view. Articles were organized by topic.
Tapping into an article gets the full content including comments and share options.
Creation interface — we imagined many of our users creating content on the go, and it was an exciting challenge to try to keep the mobile creation experience simple, yet retain powerful editing features. I was able to push this much further than competitors at the time like Medium.
We located the "Add" and "Save" actions in the top bar. When the user pressed the "Plus" button the tab bar appeared providing the ability to add the different element types to the article.
Text editing tools always appeared above the keyboard. A long tap on the screen shrank the article to its main parts - picture, heading, and paragraphs. In this unique view the user was able to quickly replace or remove parts of the article.
Writer / editor mechanics — our most unique product twist was that writers were not only paid per view, they also got help from professional editors that would help them strengthen their writing, find an image, and promote the story on social media. While this added huge value for the writers, it also was one of the biggest risks in our plan to scale up the platform.
Desktop web consumption —
Desktop web creation —
Post launch — Pheed was in beta testing with a limited set of writers - most of them coming from universities around New York City, but the app never quite found product market fit. Looking back at this wild startup ride I’d speculate that we should have done more up front user research, focus on a smaller target audience, and then grown out from there.