A News Platform
Our biggest success at DoApp was our mobile news platform. At its peak it had 90 customers, managed more than 700 apps and 10 million daily active users.
Performance Driven
Build Engagement
Build user experiences that give our customers every opportunity to engage with their users. Give customers the tools to build their audiences.
Minimize Friction
Get out of the way! Make sure our design doesn’t get in the way. Test our designs to make sure our UX patterns are consistent and intuitive.
Ad Revenue
Build fun and thoughtful advertising experiences to drive financial returns to our customers and their advertisers.
Core User Experiences
Article
The core to most of the new industry is the article view. Our article views had to support photo, video, embeds, pre-roll advertising, in-line advertising and more. It had to support all media, load progressively and load instantly.
Video
Our broadcast clients and their users thrive on great video playback experiences. With a continuous, auto-play video scrollview we can deliver a variety of advertising and seamless video playback for users.
Photo Galleries
Analytically, photo galleries generated a lot of activity across our user base. We built two photo experiences with single galleries and multi-galleries.
Audio
Many of our customers were running podcasts or multiple live audio streams. We built robust tools so their audiences could listen to audio within and outside of our app.
Weather Radar
We wanted weather radar to be easy-to-use, fast and extensible to our clients. It is still one of the most straight forward radar interfaces you can find on iOS and Android.
Severe Weather Alerts
Our bundled services included user-centric weather alerts. When a user adds a location to their app they are also given the choice to subscribe to severe weather alerts for that location.
Sports
Our sports integration would add another layer of engagement for users. End users can follow their favorite sports team get game details and an up to date scoreboard.
Personality
With 400 apps in the marketplace, we had to make sure that our apps were highly customizable. The challenge was doing this without disrupting the core user experiences in the app.
Live Video
To our broadcast customers, going live across the platform at every broadcast was very important. When that happened, users would be notified and we would take them to the home screen where it was being displayed.
Make it stand out with
Section Takeovers
Click through the the featured “takeovers” below. Each takeover was highly customizable and could be dynamically adjusted by content producers throughout the day.
Targeted Push
One of the most thrilling features we built was a targeted push system. News content is changing all the time and so are the new topics. We needed a flexible system from end-to-end that was easy for end users to understand and flexible enough for content producers to embrace.
The Onboarding Dilemma
Anyone who makes mobile apps understands the UX dilemma around onboarding a user to your mobile app. Along with successfully setting up with your core features, you have permissions and global privacy regulations you have to build around. Doing this well can be a real feat of design and engineering. We focused on active and passive onboarding.
Platform Extensions
Over the years, we build for countless platforms. I have built and designed applications for everything from WebOS to Windows along with IoT platforms.
iPad
Our applications on iOS and Android all had to have elegant responsive design solutions. iPad was always a flagship product for us. Most of our users were using our apps through mobile but showing a great iPad news apps always impressed our customers. It was a passion project for the team.
Wearables
We never did build a stand-alone watch application. Once the hype for the Apple Watch waned, we pushed harder on making our push notifications more robust rather than investing into a native watch app. We also questioned if users really wanted to read news on their watch.
Made for TV
The smart TV revolution had arrived. We knew we were dealing with completely different user personality when they sit down in front of the TV. A variety of user research and rapid prototyping made it obvious, that we were not building an experience that was passive enough. We built custom, native apps for Roku, tvOS and Android TV.
Voice User Interfaces
Another extension of our news platform involved Voice User Interfaces (VUI). We built skills for Alexa and Google Home. It was my first project involving VUI and this one was fairly straight forward, “Alexa, read me the news.” The more difficult problems were around the management of audio streams in our admin and helping our customers build audiences on the platform.
Great tools to manage it all.
If the tool you use to manage your products have terrible UX, it’s likely that your apps will have a miserable UX. We took a lot of time and pride in building an app management tool that is consumer-grade, transparent, actively analytical and easy to use.
