However, Breuer noted that as well as changing the kind of content offered at evenings and weekends to be more lifestyle-orientated, it might also be beneficial to alter the formatting of the app. The recently launched NYT Now app from the New York Times offers personalisation along similar lines, suggesting news summaries early in the day followed by longer reads to users in the evening, when people generally have more free time. "It's about how we put it together and how we curate it so it's intelligible."īreuer noted there were opportunities in future development to "explore another level of richness" when it came to personalisation and how content might change, not only at different times of day, but also at the weekend. The reason that people come to us is about more than just our copy Tom Grinsted, the Guardian"The reason that people come to us is about more than just our copy," he said. The reason the homepage is not fully customisable, with the top story locked in place, said Grinsted, because user-testing revealed "quite an extreme appetite" for a strong authorial voice. There is also a new function for users to save articles for reading offline. Users can add or remove sections of the site according to their interests, and can also programme the homepage to just show news from a particular location.īuilding on the Guardian's breaking news service, users can also follow their favourite Guardian blogs or contributors, and receive notifications when new content is published. ![]() Although the top story on the app homepage is fixed, beyond that the entire homepage is completely configurable. The new Guardian app offers high levels of personalisation. "On small screen sizes, spaces is at a premium, so is more effective than overloading the app with labelling and typography," Breuer said. Whereas the Guardian previously appointed colours to different sections, such as news or sport, the new app marks content by tone or type (blue is used for core news content, orange for comments, charcoal for multimedia and red for live content such as liveblogs). The app also uses "colour language" to guide users through different sorts of content, explained Guardian creative director Alex Breuer. However, these positions can vary depending on the context of the story, so an article which is only of medium importance on the app homepage can still take the top spot in the sports section. In the new Guardian app, all stories have a layer of data, programmed by the newsroom, which controls how and where the story appears in the app.įor example, a more important story will be given a larger card and placed in a more prominent position. The idea, said Grinsted, is to bring back the sort of "intuitive" information imparted when print journalists lay out newspapers, where the layout of the page denotes the most important stories of the day. ![]() Whereas the previous Guardian app was "very much a basic list", the redesigned app has a flexible layout which allows editors to curate stories according to their significance.Ĭontent is presented via 'cards' in varying sizes, similar to the format of Facebook's Paper. "It makes much more sense for us to be unified and speak with one voice no matter how you visit."ĭevelopment on the app began in autumn 2013, and included a beta-testing programme with feedback from more than 5,000 users. ![]() ![]() On average our users are using us across three different devices a day Tom Grinsted, the Guardian"On average our users are using us across three different devices a day, so it doesn't make a lot of sense for the authorial voice to radically vary between them."
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