Citizenside (more commonly known as the global news community) are a social news website that invites members to upload photography of current affairs as and when they are taking place. The photos are then made available to various media outlets to purchase for use under licence thus enabling the general public to become the news reporters / photographers they have always wanted to be and more importantly make money doing so!

We were tasked with helping Citizenside aggregate several disperate user journeys into a single, consolidated experience, gathered around the core concept of Social News aggregation. To do this we first had to analyse the initial state of the website and construct very specific user journeys to ensure we had covered every area necessary in the re-design.

Once this was established we could begin work on the branding of the website and scrutinising the functionality, stripping out any un-necessary aspects of the user journey that could cause confusion to users and so leave them with a negative impression. With this accomplished the new look and feel of the website could begin, this involved building on the existing branding and introducing a global colour scheme that would see the website being instantly recognisable and standing alone above all other websites within its market. To achieve this every major page to the website was completely re-designed, introducing simple modular aspects to create an easy navigation system which in turn offered a brilliant platform to feature the latest uploads, stories and most active users on the homepage.

As well as building on the existing website functionality, we also offered suggestions of ways to improve the website and give users a more rewarding experience. These suggestions would see the inclusion of members profile pages, featuring elements such as recently uploaded, liked stories and much more. This also lead to the idea of members being rewarded when they reach certain criteria (50 picture uploaded etc) which in turn would encourage a more active community and ultimately successful website.

It really was a great project for us to involved in and we wish Citizenside all the best with their new website