Design for BFM.ru applications: the general and the particular in the line of native mobile applications for the news portal
Hello!
In July, we announced the publication of mobile applications for the business information portal BFM.ru - iOS and Windows 8 versions. For our mobile development department, this project has become another application for news resources, including Newsweek, Slate, Engadget, and others. To summarize the experience and share it with readers, for whom the issues of design of news applications are relevant, we decided to make a small retrospective sketch on the design of the line of mobile applications of the BFM.ru portal.
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BFM.ru is a large, complexly structured news portal that supports 7 main headings, blogs, and “In Focus” and “Photo of the Day” sections. Here and "Real Estate", and "Finance", and "Auto", and "Technology", and everything that can be interesting to a business person. The attendance of the site can be judged by the following figures: in April 2013, more than 4 million people visited the site. All of them come to BFM.ru, because it is one of the most authoritative and informative Russian-language business sites. We faced a difficult task not to lose face with such a serious media and its vast audience.
From the point of view of design, two main tasks were highlighted:
1. The interface of mobile applications must be adapted to different platforms (iPhone, iPad, Windows 8) and meet the design requirements for them. At the same time, he should maintain common features and not lose touch with the BFM.ru web portal. After all, let's not forget: it was necessary to make a line of native applications. We had to repeat the experience of creating the line, as we already did with the Komsomolskaya Pravda TV and Radio channel.
2. The second task was to make the news application interesting. Portal BFM.ru specializes in business information, the news mostly does not contain illustrations. It was necessary to brighten up the abundance of text with something pleasing to the eye.
First of all, it was decided to keep the newspaper style and implement it on all platforms and devices. We broke the articles into newspaper columns and thus made it easier to read the text, while maintaining the severity and elegance of the business news publication.
Highlighting of the article’s headline, announcement, publication date with different fonts, displaying small picture previews in the lists of articles for each category, portraits of the authors in the “Blogs” section made the appearance of applications more attractive, fresh and easy to read.
A small decoration of the applications was the gesture control: deleting an article from the saved ones was done by a swipe, the transition between content levels was done with the help of a “pinch” gesture.
For ease of use, the application allows you to customize the download of photos (including 3G), hiding read articles, authorization on the portal BFM.ru (including through Facebook).
Directly from the application, you can listen to the Business FM radio, which also makes the applications related and preserves inheritance between the BFM.ru portal and the radio station, which belong to the same group of companies.
We decided not to illustrate the article with screenshots, since the whole line of BFM.ru is good in movement and live use. To demonstrate the diversity of gestures and features of the interface, and at the same time the “related” links of application design, we removed a short overview. Click “View” and enjoy the BFM.ru line of mobile apps on iPhone, iPad and Microsoft Surface .
In July, we announced the publication of mobile applications for the business information portal BFM.ru - iOS and Windows 8 versions. For our mobile development department, this project has become another application for news resources, including Newsweek, Slate, Engadget, and others. To summarize the experience and share it with readers, for whom the issues of design of news applications are relevant, we decided to make a small retrospective sketch on the design of the line of mobile applications of the BFM.ru portal.
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Issues
BFM.ru is a large, complexly structured news portal that supports 7 main headings, blogs, and “In Focus” and “Photo of the Day” sections. Here and "Real Estate", and "Finance", and "Auto", and "Technology", and everything that can be interesting to a business person. The attendance of the site can be judged by the following figures: in April 2013, more than 4 million people visited the site. All of them come to BFM.ru, because it is one of the most authoritative and informative Russian-language business sites. We faced a difficult task not to lose face with such a serious media and its vast audience.
From the point of view of design, two main tasks were highlighted:
1. The interface of mobile applications must be adapted to different platforms (iPhone, iPad, Windows 8) and meet the design requirements for them. At the same time, he should maintain common features and not lose touch with the BFM.ru web portal. After all, let's not forget: it was necessary to make a line of native applications. We had to repeat the experience of creating the line, as we already did with the Komsomolskaya Pravda TV and Radio channel.
2. The second task was to make the news application interesting. Portal BFM.ru specializes in business information, the news mostly does not contain illustrations. It was necessary to brighten up the abundance of text with something pleasing to the eye.
Implementation
First of all, it was decided to keep the newspaper style and implement it on all platforms and devices. We broke the articles into newspaper columns and thus made it easier to read the text, while maintaining the severity and elegance of the business news publication.
Highlighting of the article’s headline, announcement, publication date with different fonts, displaying small picture previews in the lists of articles for each category, portraits of the authors in the “Blogs” section made the appearance of applications more attractive, fresh and easy to read.
A small decoration of the applications was the gesture control: deleting an article from the saved ones was done by a swipe, the transition between content levels was done with the help of a “pinch” gesture.
For ease of use, the application allows you to customize the download of photos (including 3G), hiding read articles, authorization on the portal BFM.ru (including through Facebook).
Directly from the application, you can listen to the Business FM radio, which also makes the applications related and preserves inheritance between the BFM.ru portal and the radio station, which belong to the same group of companies.
We decided not to illustrate the article with screenshots, since the whole line of BFM.ru is good in movement and live use. To demonstrate the diversity of gestures and features of the interface, and at the same time the “related” links of application design, we removed a short overview. Click “View” and enjoy the BFM.ru line of mobile apps on iPhone, iPad and Microsoft Surface .
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/189014/
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