The Buzz
Client: National Deaf Children’s Society
Services: Branding, UX research, UX design, Web design.
National Deaf Children’s Society presented the challenge of reinventing The Buzz, which was failing to engage with its audience of young deaf people as a simple online news blog. As a result we effectively started again, with a blank sheet of paper and a lot of imagination to create an online home for young deaf people where they could safely engage, build a community and have a fun experience all at the same time. Through user research, where we directly engaged with the young people to find out what they wanted from the new platform, we were able to deliver a solution which was driven by their feedback and requirements at each stage of the process. This was a project I worked on at Studio Republic where I was the project lead throughout and built the user journeys, sitemap, wireframes, user interface and visual prototypes along with the creation of the brand’s logo and identity.
The solution
The Buzz is a web app that is essentially a social content platform exclusively for young deaf people. The content is posted by NDCS along with user generated content which has to go through moderation. Young people are able to upvote certain pieces of content and build their own library of saved content from the feed. All content is categorised to allow young people to view content in the areas they are interested in. The young deaf people we engaged with told us that they wanted to be able to interact with each other and gain news and advice from their community. We added the Ask The Buzz feature to enable them to create polls and questions which they can put out to the community and receive answers on.
Accessibility was a key consideration throughout the entire process. Young people are able to view the content across the site in BSL to ensure that those who struggle with reading and those who prefer to see the content in BSL are able to do so.
The brand, customisation & impact
Insight that came from young people was that they wanted to integrate gaming into the platform in some way and be able to stamp their identity on the platform. While the scope of the project wasn’t to produce a game, this did inform the aesthetic of the brand which I created inspired by a gaming aesthetic. Young people are able to customise their own unique experience through selecting an accessible colour theme and background. Additionally they can create their own personal avatar with a wide range of customisable elements including hearing technology that is used to represent their profile when using The Buzz which is a feature they love.
Since The Buzz has been launched it has received some amazing feedback from young people and had 8,624 users in the first month alone. We continue to adopt a test and learn approach in order to add new features and improve the overall user experience for deaf young people.
