The war of news aggregators: personalization or customization? Top Story Application Development Experience

    As Aldous Huxley predicted, we live in a crazy time - there is an incredible amount of information. Sites, social networks, mail, instant messengers, SMS, televisions, radio and many, many, many more - every day we receive a very large flow of necessary and unnecessary (of course, most often unnecessary) news from different channels, designed to satisfy our curiosity about what is happening around. But people want to receive quality information, and not a story chewed several times.





    That is why news aggregators were invented, allowing you to select and "customize" information from the Internet in order to deliver news of interest to the user. But it’s not enough just to correctly sort and provide news - it is important to give them to each user in accordance with his interests and tastes. This is how the first personalized Top Story news aggregator appeared.

    Personalization ≠ Customization

    One of the main trends in the development of the Internet in recent years is personalization - the user sees only what meets his needs. Everyone has seen a million times advertisements for products that they recently looked for in an online store. This is an example of how the Internet adjusts to the behavior of an individual user.

    However, it is important to distinguish personalization from “customization”. Unfortunately, in RuNet these two concepts are often confused. The first is responsible for converting the product itself to the needs of the user. This is not a one-time process, but the constant work of an Internet service that learns, remembers certain aspects of behavior, analyzes them and gives the user the result he needs.

    But with “customization” everything is much simpler - the user chooses what he likes and what he is used to, and the process stops there. That is, we are talking only about the settings.

    Now the number of resources in Runet has reached such volumes that even a fairly experienced reader may not be aware of the existence of many of them. And so we decided to take on the role of a guide and help users not only organize information, but also pick up interesting news and resources. So, if before a vacation a person is looking for information about the weather and excursions in the country of visit, the application will respond to his need and will offer relevant articles on his interests. After the vacation, the user again immerses himself in working topics, and the application easily adapts to his changing requests.

    Overloaded interface

    We at Top Story have long puzzled over which format of presenting news would be most convenient for the user. It was important to get away from the overloaded interface and reduce the number of clicks on the way to the article, so the menu is located at the top of the screen and easily scrolls along with the list of news for each section. We structured the content based on the following principles:

    • Much does not mean convenient - modern sites abound with articles and pictures that most users do not even pay attention to.

    • The user is used to the format of social networks - all news is read from top to bottom, each news can be accompanied by a picture, for any news there are the same window sizes. All this makes it easy to distinguish one post from another and not get lost in the information flow.

    • The simpler, the better - we respect the user and try to understand his real needs. A news application is primarily information, and therefore we strive to make sure that the user does not distract anything from reading.

    Months of testing led us to the simplest design - a news feed that meets all the needs of the user and allows him to get exactly what he wants.



    Training

    Common truth says: you can not stop learning. We also try to follow it! Therefore, we follow user reviews, answer their questions and create updates based on their recommendations. We are open to communication and ready to improve the application.

    A key feature of Top Story is a personalization system that no news aggregator has yet. The owner of the mobile device will be able not only to rely on the digest from the application, but also to prompt himself that he is interested. We suggest the user to use keywords that will facilitate the search for interesting news for him. Reading a note, he can highlight, for example, the name of the Spartak team, add it to his keywords and then receive related articles.



    Thus, the more keywords a user adds, the better the application will understand his tastes and give him the best recommendations! Query management is very flexible. If the owner of the application wants to constantly receive news on a key request, he simply adds it to the “Subscriptions”, if he changes his mind, he deletes it.

    We believe that this is a good addition to our already good feature set. The user can influence the degree of personalization and how fast the application learns to recognize it!

    And we, in turn, will be happy to hear your opinion and learn something new. The app is free and available for Android and iOS.. Email us helptopstory@gmail.com or comment on Google Play. We will always answer you and try to make Top Story even better!

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