Breaking Echo Chambers for Better Media Literacy

Ground News reached out to Pragmatics to help transition the best features from their mobile app to an all-new web experience.We worked closely with their team to release several iterations of the web app, and over time helped them develop a variety of tools their users loved including a browser extension, election trackers, and the

Blindspotter—a viral sensation on Twitter.Ground News lets news readers compare how a story is covered by thousands of sources across the political spectrum. It has helped over 250,000 readers escape their echo chambers and see the news from a different perspective. Ground News was created to be a news destination for everyone, regardless of political ideology.

What made this project special was the extremely rapid deployment of the designs. Ground News was not afraid to test things quickly—a privilege we were more than happy to have.

Our team was integrated into the technical and marketing groups at Ground News. We developed an agile approach to understanding the users needs by diving into the company’s analytics, leveraging interactions with customers on social media, and in-depth interviews with subscribers.

This unlocked a key insight that sparked our redesign: provide Ground News users with more context and overviews as well as information about their social networks, to put the news in perspective. We streamlined the existing pages to highlight the most pertinent information and developed unique tools for social media and web browsers so that Ground News was less of a destination and more of an omnipresent news companion.

We introduced a browser plugin, over 50 different new layouts for the web platform, a design system for the social media posts, and several different landing pages and newsletters. It was a full design overview and strategy that is now a core part of countless users' daily news. Ground News’ monthly subscriber base grew 10x since we started, and we’re so proud to see them continue to grow.