F.A.Z. Plus
THE CHALLENGE
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung is commonly referred to as "the New York Times of Germany." As the largest newspaper in Germany, they represented an enormous growth opportunity for Eversify. The project also represented a monumental challenge. F.A.Z. provided an app design and style guides, designed by German firm Jung von Matt.
THE PROCESS
I worked together with our project manager, sales, Jung von Matt, and the team from F.A.Z. to identify features needed in Eversify to accomplish the design, map out user flows, and wireframe and refine the server interactions with the app. The Eversify server needed an interface to communicate with F.A.Z.'s content servers, as well as existing websites and apps.
The biggest addition needed was an editorial workflow, where different editors working on articles simultaneously could easily follow the status of articles, and see which articles still needed work.
The editorial workflow was quite simple, once we identified the key tasks:
- To quickly see the status of an article. This was accomplished by color-coding the approval button in the server UI. Green meant approved. Blue was in-progress. Articles that were marked excluded from the edition appeared disabled and the approval button was grayed-out.
- Filtering. The editor could see the number of articles in any given section awaiting approval, or that had been recently modified, by a simple dropdown within each section. The dropdown would filter the articles to only the applicable selection.
I worked together with both app and server development teams to ensure that the design specs were adhered to, as well as to communicate issues as soon as possible to the customer.
Additionally, as this project was an "all-hands-on-deck" level endeavor, I translated the design specs into pixel-perfect HTML and CSS. I became comfortable enough at working within Django templates that I wrote the app edition templates code myself, in just a few weeks.
Final Product
F.A.Z. Plus successfully launched on time in phases: first the app version for tablet and mobile. Several months later, the browser version of the app launched.
Marketing Video
