By
Adriano Farano
1989: When the Berlin Wall fell down I
was only nine. Yet, I can still remember watching my first newscast while the
Cold War was coming to an end.
2010: Steve Jobs announced the iPad in
San Francisco — a device that fueled the digital video revolution.
When we started working on Watchup
we had one goal in mind: to bring all the power of video journalism to emerging
screens with a personalized newscast experience. Granted, that mainly meant the
iPad to us. But today, things have changed.
Certain Android devices have shown how
compelling a video experience can be on mobile. And when unanimous rumors
started flowing about a bigger iPhone 6, we realized the time had come for
Watchup to be redesigned for the mobile video age. Today, we are announcing
that Watchup is finally debuting on the iPhone.
But how did we go about that?
1. Design thinking. Users first
First of all, we talked to our users. A
lot. They were asking for a way to get their personalized newscast preferences
synced over the cloud. We did it. With one account you can now unlock the whole
Watchup experience on iPad, iPhone, Android tablets and soon phones, and find
your favorite channels and personalization preferences intact.
2. Your newscast is in your hand(s)
Merely converting the interface from
tablet to phone would have been easy. We could have done just that by
converting our horizontal stream from tablet to phone. Instead, we went for
re-thinking the news watching experience for mobile from the ground up. The
first way people interact with Watchup is by discovering inspiring news
content. In order to do that, users scroll, and how do they scroll through
content on mobile? In portrait mode, with one hand and a thumb. Because we
believe that more is less, unlike its tablet version, Watchup for mobile comes
with a portrait-mode only timeline view.
3. Always watch
Now, how do people watch videos? They
do in landscape mode. We found out that’s true for tablets and mobile phones.
That way if you rotate your device you will always, always, see a video playing
in full screen. Because that’s what ultimately users of a video app want —
watching videos.
4. Key features preserved
Ultimately, we preserved the key value
of the app. You open it and your newscast just plays! And it plays
continuously. This is true on tablet as it is on phone. Plus, we kept the
ability to recreate your news ritual intact. Scheduling your daily newscast is
a possibility on every device. But that is left to every device as you might
want to receive your newscast on your phone in the morning ahead of your
commute and in the evening on your tablet.
5. Watch a video, read an article
One of the most successful features on
iPad was our patent-pending watch and read interface. We preserved that on the
phone too, but the print articles now live on a separate screen you can easily
access by a simple swipe. That gives you the chance to keep listening to your
newscast. The screen was just not big enough to let you watch at the same time.
This is how we redesigned Watchup for
the mobile video age. We hope it will help you stay informed across all your
devices.
Watchup CEO and cofounder Adriano
Farano was a 2010-2011 Knight International Fellow at Stanford University.
Follow Adriano on Twitter @farano and follow Watchup @watchup.
This post first appeared on
IJNet partner PBS Idea Lab, and is published IJNet.org with permission.
Idea Lab is a group blog by innovative
thinkers and entrepreneurs who are reinventing media in the digital age.
Initially the blog was set up exclusively for authors who won a grant in the
Knight News Challenge, but now includes other Knight grantees along with other
entrepreneurs, project leaders and thinkers at the Northwestern University
Knight Lab, Reese News Lab, John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships at Stanford
and the MIT Center for Civic Media. Learn more about Idea Lab on the web,
follow Idea Lab on Twitter or on Facebook.
Image CC-licensed on Flickr via David Erickson.
No comments:
Post a Comment