August 5, 2013 at 15:42Design for BFM.ru applications: general and specific 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 designing 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.
BFM.ru is a large complexly structured news portal that supports 7 main sections, blogs and sections in Focus and Photo of the Day. Here, “Real Estate”, and “Finance”, and “Auto”, and “Technology”, and everything that may be interesting to a business person. The site traffic 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 had a difficult task not to face the serious media and its vast audience.
From the point of view of design, two main tasks were identified:
1. The interface of mobile applications must be adapted for various 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: we had to make a line of native applications. We had to repeat the experience of creating the line, as we did with the Komsomolskaya Pravda television channel.
2. The second task was to make the news app interesting. The BFM.ru portal specializes in business information; the news mostly does not contain illustrations. It was necessary to brighten up the abundance of the text with something pleasing to the eye.
First of all, it was decided to preserve the newspaper style and implement it on all platforms and devices. We divided the articles into newspaper columns and thereby facilitated the perception of the text, while maintaining the severity and elegance of the business news publication.
Highlighting in different fonts the title of the article, announcement, publication date, displaying small preview images in the article lists for each category, the portraits of the authors in the "Blogs" section made the appearance of applications more attractive, fresh, easy to read.
Gesture management served as a small decoration for applications: deleting an article from saved ones was implemented by swipe, switching between content levels using the “pinch” gesture.
For ease of use, the application allows you to configure the downloading of photos (including via 3G), hiding the articles read, authorization on the BFM.ru portal (including via Facebook).
Directly from the application, you can listen to Business FM radio, which also makes applications similar and preserves the heredity 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, as the entire line of BFM.ru is good in motion and live use. To demonstrate the variety of gestures and interface features, and at the same time “related” connections of application design, we took a short review. Click “Watch” and enjoy the BFM.ru line of mobile applications 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 designing 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.
Issues
BFM.ru is a large complexly structured news portal that supports 7 main sections, blogs and sections in Focus and Photo of the Day. Here, “Real Estate”, and “Finance”, and “Auto”, and “Technology”, and everything that may be interesting to a business person. The site traffic 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 had a difficult task not to face the serious media and its vast audience.
From the point of view of design, two main tasks were identified:
1. The interface of mobile applications must be adapted for various 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: we had to make a line of native applications. We had to repeat the experience of creating the line, as we did with the Komsomolskaya Pravda television channel.
2. The second task was to make the news app interesting. The BFM.ru portal specializes in business information; the news mostly does not contain illustrations. It was necessary to brighten up the abundance of the text with something pleasing to the eye.
Implementation
First of all, it was decided to preserve the newspaper style and implement it on all platforms and devices. We divided the articles into newspaper columns and thereby facilitated the perception of the text, while maintaining the severity and elegance of the business news publication.
Highlighting in different fonts the title of the article, announcement, publication date, displaying small preview images in the article lists for each category, the portraits of the authors in the "Blogs" section made the appearance of applications more attractive, fresh, easy to read.
Gesture management served as a small decoration for applications: deleting an article from saved ones was implemented by swipe, switching between content levels using the “pinch” gesture.
For ease of use, the application allows you to configure the downloading of photos (including via 3G), hiding the articles read, authorization on the BFM.ru portal (including via Facebook).
Directly from the application, you can listen to Business FM radio, which also makes applications similar and preserves the heredity 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, as the entire line of BFM.ru is good in motion and live use. To demonstrate the variety of gestures and interface features, and at the same time “related” connections of application design, we took a short review. Click “Watch” and enjoy the BFM.ru line of mobile applications on iPhone, iPad and Microsoft Surface .