The Concept
Back in 2018, I found it hard to get news on more underground urban artists, especially from the UK, and although there were sites & apps dedicated to music and news, none of them really felt like they had what I was looking for. A way to connect and stay updated with artists from my communities. So, over four months, I took an idea from observation through to a designed and prototyped Android application.
Research & Definition
The starting point was understanding why the gap existed and what a dedicated platform would need to do differently. Existing apps treated news as an add-on, something to engage users between listens rather than a destination in its own right. The information architecture reflected that, with news typically several taps away from the home screen.
The design direction for The Pulse inverted that hierarchy. News was the product. Everything else, like categories, search, saved articles, and notifications, was built to support that primary use case rather than compete with it.
Planning and Initial Designs
After doing some primary and secondary research, I then went on to create the designs and user flows. I created wireframe designs of all the pages and their layouts. Using these, I created initial designs for some pages, then got feedback from people within the target audience and adjusted the designs to what the users felt would improve the overall experience of the app.
I went through various iterations of names, logos and colour schemes and received feedback on them before settling on a design. Below you can see the logo and colour scheme that was picked for the app:
UI Design
The visual direction was built to feel editorial rather than functional, closer to a digital magazine than a utility app. Typography and layout did the heavy lifting, with a clear hierarchy between headlines, metadata and body copy. The colour palette was intentionally restrained to let the content imagery lead.
The UI was designed for Android, following Material Design conventions where they served the concept, and departing from them where a more considered typographic or layout decision made more sense for the product.
When designing, I started with the landing page and main page (which shows general news articles) and then a page showing the news article itself.
After creating the news & article pages, I repurposed these to develop the majority of the other pages for my app, as they follow similar layouts and structures with slightly different designs depending on the content being shown.
Once those were created, the final few pages to design were the ‘albums’ page and the search and profile pages. These were done last as they follow a different design compared to the rest of the pages.
Prototype & Build
Beyond the design, I built a basic working prototype in Android Studio (PhoneGap at the time). This was enough to demonstrate the core flows and validate that the design held up in a real environment rather than just in static screens. It was an early exposure to the gap between a design file and a functioning interface, and it shaped how I think about the relationship between design decisions and their technical implications.
