Sebastien Monney - BroadFeed

Overview

BroadFeed was concepted, designed and built by the Product Development Group at Organic, which I led. The Group’s mandate was to be a leader in creating new engaging experiences for emerging platforms.

The launch of the iPad in 2010 and the growing popularity of Twitter gave us an opportunity to explore crafting a new experience built for tablets.

The app launched at SXSW in early 2011, receiving great reviews from the press and users.

BroadFeed – overview video

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Problem

On Twitter, users can easily miss the stories shared in their feed because of the high frequency of posts, and the general constraints of a tweet. The larger their network, the greater the chances of content being buried and left unnoticed.

In 2011, Twitter didn't offer any preview of the content shared behind links.

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Solution

BroadFeed parses the links shared on Twitter, and curates them for the user based on popularity. Now a user can, at a glance, view the best content shared in their feed.

A full Twitter lists directory is also available within the app for additional content discovery.

The content is viewed through various lenses including an editorial, photo and zeitgeist views, and can be saved for later reading.

Last but not least, the content is curated within various timespans (selected by the user) by a server side application which constantly monitors the feeds and weighs the content being shared.

While Apps like Pulse and Flipboard were released around the same time, none offered a content curation mechanism. We felt it was a key functionality, so that a user would never missed the good bits, regardless of how often they used the app.

BroadFeed was the first Organic branded product, sharing the same visual DNA

The editorial view uses a grid system which emphasized the top stories

Interaction and styleguide detail

Photography view – Thumbnails are cropped to fill the grid layout for visual appeal (a minimal image size from the original of the article was required for an image to appear in this view)

Week in Review (zeitgeist) view – In landscape mode, we used the length of the blue bar as a visual cue of popularity between stories

Twitter lists directory – We felt is was necessary to add this content directory for new Twitter users to discover content that they could add to their feed

Article detail – A clean view is available for a better reading experience

Promotional landing page on Organic.com

I designed this promotional poster to showcase at a glance what BroadFeed could do

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Honors & Awards

2011 – Top 10 New and Noteworthy, Apple app store.

2011 – User Experience Awards
BroadFeed, A Social Newspaper For Tablets - Honorable Mention

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Press

AdAge

The Next Web

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What I did

I managed this project from end to end. First in defining the scope of the product, then working closely with two interaction designers in establishing the experience, building prototypes at various levels of fidelity, and then working with visual designers on layouts and visual directions. Eventually, I took on the design, finalizing the UI and all visual design assets.

I worked closely with a sub-contractor during the iOS development phase, as we didn't have that capacity in-house.

Finally, I wrote an outline for a demo video of the app, and hired a director to shoot it. A copywriter was brought on board to finalize the narrative and record the voice over. Later, a motion designer got to fix a lot of things in post...

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Retro

This was a very fun & rewarding project to work on, and it defined the type of work I wanted to focus on in the future.

Of course, we made many mistakes along the way, overdid it a bit on the UI, realized that the computing power needed to do this was quite big (it took awhile for a feed to compile when first using the app), we hardly did any usability testing apart from in-house, and having SXSW as a deadline made us rush through the release of the app.

The release of the app did lead to new client work for Walmart, who's CMO was using the app and hired us to design their first iPad e-commerce experience. Also, a well known news organization offered to buy our content weighing and curation IP.

The bittersweet part here is that after one release and a couple minor updates, we didn't invest further in the app, as Organic's leadership felt they had gotten their investment back with the new client work it had brought in.