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Timeline — News in context
Timeline is a news app that brings historical context to today's news. We wanted to use historical context to deepen our knowledge of the force that shapes the present. The goal of Timeline was to create experiments around how we can change the way we consume news.
Top 25 apps of the year presented by Apple
Objective
Design a new way to experience current events
Timeline
7 months from pitch to launch
Role
Lead Product designer
" Help us understand what links us, not what divides us, bring people together and break down the walls we or others have put around ourselves."
Tamer Hassanein, CEO of Timeline
Historians
We interviewed historians to understand how they perceive historical events being tied to current events. Understanding how they tell a story and tie together information allowed us to build a product around this mental model
Journalists
We hired a team of journalists to help design our stories. The editorial team helped create meaningful, media-rich content that connected past to present in an intuitive way.
Innovating the news experience
Exploring different ways to tell today's news using different mediums
Using design for story telling
Using design to tie together historical events and people from different eras
Designing a tool for journalists
Design a tool meant to help journalists write with contextual insights
Localization
Designing with different languages and context in mind
Navigating a 800 year-long story in a compelling and relevant way
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We wanted to connect the dots on how we as humans got here. Adding additional context on things and visualizing the time between everything using a timeline.
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We also needed to design a tool that writes these distinctive stories — to help construct the article but also to help give perspective on what's being written
Context engine writing tool prototype
Using the smart entity tagging tool, writers are able to quickly add contextual links to articles without having to go elsewhere. The context engine will figure out keywords that may be interesting to add extra context.
Timeline became one of the top apps of the year
Writing well thought out stories takes a lot of time and effort
As we built Timeline we realized the need to help journalists write this type of news. In the end, we needed to shorten the length of these stories and add to it in the future to help with the timeliness of stories
Keeping the momentum alive
The launch of timeline gave us a lot of momentum but it built an expectation around our product that we needed to fulfill. New stories every other day and different innovative formats of reading these types of stories pushed us forward to our readers
Monetization
Monetization on a free reading platform was a new concept I had to work with. Partnerships with other publishers and companies gave us more visibility as well as helped spread the types of stories we were writing
Timeline was a partnership project. I was the lead product designer from 2015-2016. Timeline stopped writing stories in late 2018.
Awards
Apple - #11 in app of the year
Time - Best apps of the year list
Apple - Editor's choice
Apple - Best app of January 2015
Stats
- Over 500k unique visitors on launch week
- App sessions are 2x higher than the industry average
- Demo'd in Apple store iPhones in 3 continents
