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MyNews

Overview

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MyNews is news media site based on blogs, photos, and other user-generated content. It's a full Web 2.0 site with rich community and social networking features built on AJAX technologies.

The Business

Moscow News is a publishing house and newspaper with a 75-year history. It started as a traditional weekly newspaper and is now one of the most prominent Russian periodicals. Moscow News began its Internet presence a long time ago, but there has been a new boom in recent years called Web 2.0 — with blogging and social networking. And this boom has been pulling more and more readers off ordinary news sites. So it's not a surprise that traditional media is turning its head to blogging and its various aspects.

The social news service MyNews is Moscow News' answer to this new boom. It mixes materials from professional journalists with text and photos from regular bloggers to make news and pictures of the day — and that's what this project is about. Add in social networking, podcasting, electronic content marketplace, mobile posting, and a lot of other on-demand features, and you'll get MyNews. Moscow News requested that UI Modeling Company design and specify a user interface for this new project.

The Solution

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After discussions with the customer, the overall process was broken down into two phases. Since funding was needed to launch the service, the first phase was to create a pilot project to present it to investors and other stakeholders. The next phase was to have a user interface design and all other project specifications ready. Initial analysis and a series of additional discussions with the client allowed UI Modeling Company to define personas that described key users of the system. Moscow News had already conducted marketing research, which helped us understand users and their needs more deeply. This analysis, along with the creation of page flows, gave us the vision for how the user interface functionality should be presented and for the specification plan that should be written.

Then, in close contact with Moscow News, the user interface page layouts, or wireframes, were created. UI Modeling Company clearly tracked the context of these pages — what was needed by different types of users, how users worked, etc. — and made users' tasks quick and easy. To find out if there were any usability problems, an internal usability test was conducted. As a result of this test, service links and user profiles were improved. After wireframes were finished, we created a light but pleasant visual design for MyNews pages. The goal was well-drawn and properly accented page elements presented in a structured fashion. The final step of the user interface design phase — an interactive prototype of connected HTML pages that could be clicked through — imitated MyNews' real functionality and allowed the client to evaluate the quality and effectiveness of this application before the program code was written.

But the prototype was good only for the client's internal review and development tasks. The investors needed a standalone presentation that could tell about MyNews itself. UI Modeling Company created a video presentation that included two parts. The first, a PowerPoint-like slide show, talked about the project as a whole — its goals, target audience, and profits as well as other business, technical, and social aspects. The second part, a demonstration of the site based on the interactive prototype, showed its look, feel, and functionality.

The rest of the process was more about writing than design; use cases and software requirement specifications were created. All the deliverables were cross-referenced and described in detail. One of the aims of these specifications was to create comfortable and detailed reading for project management and development teams.

The Result

The MyNews presentation was supported by detailed but not overloaded comments, and it helped show the system's abilities in a vivid and dynamic way. We helped Moscow News run the presentation session successfully, and they received money for further development. It's also important that the presentation was made as a standalone movie, since it has been distributed on CDs and published on the web to reach a bigger audience.

It's important that Moscow News received a user interface model with all the functionality questions settled in a user-centered manner. We created a production manual that described how to implement this user interface; this was a set of documents that can be given to any development team the customer chooses. And, of course, the software requirement specifications make it possible to estimate precise development time and costs.

The ROI

The presentation movie made it easier for Moscow News to convince investors to give them money for development. Another benefit was the precise specifications for the price and terms for project development.

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