Design Document
Team IV is a 2009 New Media Team Project Group focusing on Web Feeds, and we are currently in the middle of one of two academic quarters being spent on this project.
Our goal is to design and develop an application which is a “one stop shop” for all of your popular news and gossip. At this point, we are looking at doing a somewhat abstract visualization of various mainstream RSS feeds, and creating an application which is both practical and artistic in itself. We would like to create “connections” between these feeds, something we believe has not yet been done for an RSS based website, such as Digg or NewsMap.
These “connections” we are looking to create have yet to be decided on. Our ideas range from practical and obvious, such as finding related stories based on what they are about, or what words are in the title – to obscure connections like how many times the letter ‘a’ appears in an article.
Concept Background
Feeds
- BBC
- Fox News
- CNN
- Newsweek
- New York Times
- Al Jazeera
Goals
- to create an application that will display information in a unique and interactive way.
- to have the connections between nodes be as significant as the content or have the connections between the nodes prompt the user to thing/organize information in new ways
- to change or show the way people think about information and how it interacts with an environment, other information or people.
- to change or show how users interace with information.
User Experience
Audience Definition
Teens/Young Adults – web surfers who are looking for the new hot video on You Tube or looking for interesting images on Fail Blog. The people in this group might not be searching for anything specific but would like to find new and interesting sites to share with friends.
Adults/Parents – web surfers who are looking for a specific type of information. The people in this group would be looking for an article or site about a specific topic. While finding interesting viral content may not be this groups main objective on the site, they might be able to find something related to their search.
Special Interest – those who know exactly what he/she wants. This group of people is looking for specialized content and relating articles.
Scenarios
Competitive Analysis
Visual Inspo:
Site Content
Functional Requirements
- Search function
- Ability to filter information
- Ability to follow ‘connections’ from one article/site/page to another
Wireframes
