alimat-inc.com - Projects

Crowdsource the news. We help this innovative startup foster interactivity and community in the wild, wired world of citizen journalism.

Allvoices is a San Francisco-based citizen journalism outlet and social-media platform. Members can contribute original reports, images, videos and news links from anywhere in the world, from their computer or mobile device.

When a new story’s posted, Allvoices’ proprietary system assigns it a credibility rating and surrounds it with related media, creating an automatic “big news” page. Contributors can collaborate and comment on each other’s posts. The site has a community of over 275,000 citizen journalists, filing reports from over 160 different countries, with close to 5 million unique visitors per month.

The Upgrade
We redesigned Allvoices in October 2008, collaborating with the site's in-house marketing and development teams. Our goal was a clean, intuitive interface that fosters interactivity and community. We continue to work with the team to add features, enhance functionality, and create targeted partner opportunities.

A typical front page after a recent upgrade pass

The Starting Point
We started our redesign with Allvoices’ then-site as the jumping off point (screenshot below). All the elements for a robust interactive experience were live—they just needed organization and consistency. Working closely with the team, we:

Removed the pop-up “what is Allvoices?” graphic in favor of a guided tour with an anchoring info graphic (top of this page)
Clearly differentiated user-generated vs. mainstream news
Highlighted interactivity and social networking
Consolidated multiple search functions into a single site-wide field; created a more robust location-based browsing feature
Reorganized the right rail to hold ads as well as special features and call-outs, to enhance traffic circulation and SEO

Client: Allvoices

Services: Brand identity, web design,
copy editing, info graphics

Link: Allvoices.com

“Matt and Alison are a delight to work with. They quickly took our high-level specs and turned them into mockups, then working prototypes, then live-site pages, and continue to work collaboratively with us on usability and further iterations. They are creative, attentive, reliable, and have always delivered on time. I love the clean and simple design they’ve created, and their editorial skills in coming up with the right copy for the site content and terminology. I look forward to a long and fruitful partnership.”

Amra Tareen
CEO and Founder, Allvoices

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