How We Designed a Digital News Portal for Our Student Media

Have you ever looked at a student organization you belong to and realized a massive piece of the puzzle is completely missing? When I was active as a member of Magazinc!, which is a student organization in Telkom University that has main activity in mass media publishing, we faced a reality check. Back in 2019, despite knowing how important an online presence was for official communication and advertising revenue, we still didn’t have our own dedicated news portal website. To make matters more challenging, other campus media groups were already running active online platforms. I knew we needed to build a platform that could compete with existing campus media.

Running a student publication means keeping up with how readers consume information today. While our social media channels and print magazines were active, lacking an online news portal put us at a disadvantage compared to other campus media organizations. We needed a digital home that could share student stories and establish a formal channel for the organization itself. Rather than assuming what our readers wanted, I decided to tackle this challenge through a structured research and design project from the beginning.

Investigating the Need

To understand what the new platform needed, we combined several forms of data collection. We reviewed literature on news portal design and user experience principles, interviewed our editor-in-chief to understand the organization’s goals and target audience, and surveyed 100 Telkom University students about the types of news they wanted to read. We also observed existing campus and national news websites to examine how they organized content and presented information to their readers.

The results gave us several concrete directions for the platform. Students showed interest in campus news, career information, and competitions, which informed the content structure of the portal. We also introduced a citizen journalism category called Bebas Berisik to give students a way to publish their own stories. The platform was designed responsively for desktop and mobile screens, with typography adjusted for readability and our signature brand blue used to maintain the organization’s visual identity.

However, the project remained at the design stage, so we never had the opportunity to see how students would actually use the platform. We could identify what they wanted from a potential news portal, but we could not determine whether those findings would translate into sustained readership or participation once the platform was operating.