Mittelbayerische Zoom

Its a reactive news-app that gives the user a way to influence the local news - Track: Digital Journalism

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Inspiration

We wanted the users to give a way to influence the news on our website and make the news more interesting for our local readers

What it does

  • Zoom is a reactive news app, that allows the user to post news on their own
  • It‘s a platform, that provides the users a wider reach with their posts → our website already has five million hits a month
    • The news are rated by the community → the best news are on fire in your newsfeed
    • The users can challenge the Mittelbayerische and give the journalists assignments → The editors have to reply to - the challenge in 48 hours; but it‘s only a challenge, if at least ten people are also interested in this topic

How we built it

  • We build the visual prototype with proto.io so we could decide how the basic layout should look like
  • The programming was made with reactnative, a tool to build mobile apps using only javascript. It uses the same deign as react letting you compose a rich mobile UI from declaritive components
  • The design of the Prototype and the Logos as well the icons with the company colours of the Mittelbayerische and decided that the logo is a present part of the app to link it with the company and show that the news has a solid journalistic basement

Challenges we ran into

  • How to sort out the important stuff and not get fake-news on the side
  • How to integrate the users as part of a dynamic news process
  • How to keep the privacy of the users and the photos and news about the people they want to post
  • How to make it intuitive, relevant and easy to use
  • How can the user interact with the journalist
  • Only one guy know about reactnative but we had the make the app with it

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Our group!
  • The "Challenge the Mittelbayerische!"-Option
  • The relevancy for our users, the opinion of every user counts!

What we learned

  • Muhammad: How great it is to work in a team and get other perspectives.
  • Pranav: Putting the user in the center of the design process.
  • Simone: I've learned that with a great team you can build something cool in a short amount of time.
  • Victoria: I've learned new instruments to implement, new programms to implement and met nice people.
  • Ramona: I've learned what work is behind an app for the programmers.

What's next for Mittelbayerische Zoom

  • We hope that we can develop our idea for the Mittelbayerische and maybe even for other newspapers.
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