Why did we do this?

2016 was momentous for the United States community because it faced a unique presidential election with media and globally relevant candidates. Donald Trump’s presence meant many changes that until then had not been discussed so directly, and for this reason, he had both followers and detractors of his campaign. On the other hand, Hillary Clinton evoked Bill Clinton’s legacy from a slightly more liberal perspective.

These presidential elections had a very relevant additional vote: the Latino vote. It was the perfect setting to develop this mass communication project for the Hispanic community in North America.

What was the challenge?

As part of the Univision news design team that year, I was challenged to build a powerful, versatile, and timeless tool. Eventually, this solution could generate media coverage for other events, always offering a central and unique value: real-time information.

Some considerations to take into account for this project were:

• Easy content feed from any platform
• Wide variety of tools and paragraphs (multimedia, text enhancements, connection with social media, opinion, etc.)

Opportunities

The most significant opportunity for us as a news unit was to create a powerful tool that would allow us to cover events in real time. For the 2016 presidential elections, given the importance of the Latino vote, thinking of a simple artifact that could easily feed content of any size represented a significant challenge in product strategy, design, and journalism.

Design Understanding

The entire design understanding for creating this artifact was based on editorial tools within posts associated with a timeline.

To keep in mind, a news post is made up of several elements:

• Headline
• Description
• Media resources
• Pinned post
• Bullet post
• Quotes
• Block quotes
• Expert Opinion

In addition to all these editorial tools, and due to the project’s primary purpose: «enabling information in real-time,» having a mobile experience was also mandatory. The entire focus of product development came from this platform since Latino voters had greater access to their cell phones than desktop computers.

Design solution

A live blog is structured as a series of posts chained to a timeline showing an event’s traceability. We analyzed several journalistic tools that cover live events to do this exercise. To build a design that generates value, we looked at references from sports, news, and even social events; from each, we took the most significant elements to build our appropriate solution for the Hispanic community. Below, we will see the anatomical study of each post and how they create an artifact of journalistic coverage together.

What I learned from this project

Being part of the news division of a highly relevant Latin network like Univision at a political and historical moment for the United States was a dream come true, especially by understanding and developing mass communication tools that sought to keep voters informed that year.

The live blog is an outstanding achievement as an artifact of experience since today, it is still widely used, and its essence is still maintained. It is a versatile and very easy-to-administrate device.

Upon finishing this project and seeing its use today, I realize that as designers, we can generate changes in society and provide truly relevant solutions in today’s society.