Society of News Design

The competition was rigorous and the decisions difficult but the five World’s Best Designed are:

• CNN.com: World’s Best-Designed News Web Site
• CNN for iPad: World’s Best Designed News App
• The Globe and Mail: World’s Best-Designed News Web site
• The Guardian for iPhone: World’s Best-Design Mobile App
• NPR for iPad: World’s Best-Designed News App

Just about all of the winning news organizations designed incredible experiences across multiple platforms. Picking which organization on which platform might have been the most difficult part of the judging.

You can read more about the reasoning behind the awards here.

In place of a newsroom programmed, linear newscast Newscaster is an on-demand, user-driven video newscasts across a range of mobile and tablet devices (like the iPad) using an accessible, cross-device programming standard. The digital newscast would take full advantage of web-native technologies like HTML5 and JavaScript, but will be developed within the intent of being a mobile app, aiming to make news easier to consume while on the go…

…The application will allow users to add content to their own playlist and make news judgment decisions traditionally reserved for professional producers in a control room. Users can have any kind of news (weather, sports, crime, education, etc.), can play their own newscast at any time (rather than waiting for 10 p.m.) or choose from a variety of automatically generated newscasts that fit the time they have at hand (10, 15, 30 minute newscasts)…

Please read the rest of the entry and vote for Newscaster.

Merck has been publishing it’s Manual since the late 1890s. In the mid-1990s Agile Partners helped Merck publish that data on the Web. But even portable laptops are not always available when users need medical data. So in 2009 I teamed up with Agile Partners and Merck to create an on-the-go iPhone app.

The app makes it easy for home users to handle emergencies and for medically professionals to diagnose patient symptoms.

The Home Edition version of the app has been a regular in the iTunes Store’s What’s Hot list. Here are some of the things reviewers have said about the app design:

• iMedicalApps: What I liked:
  • - Navigation and User Interface are beautifully designed
  • - Ability to E-mail or copy portions of selected articles is a nice touch
  • - Bookmarking of your favorite articles
  • - Can manipulate text size
  • - Could see this actually improving a patient-physician relationship
• MedTapp: Thumbs up for…
  • - easy navigation
  • - neat interface
• The New York Times Gadget Blog: If you are think you suffer from something slightly more exotic, the Merck Manual of Medical Information is now available as a $9.99 application for the iPhone. It lists enough illnesses to stump even Dr. Gregory House. it covers everything from Abetalipoproteinemia to Zollinger-Ellison Syndrome. A section on Emergencies and injuries offers practical information on treating everything from life-threatening injuries to bug bites.

For 12 weeks almost a dozen Medill graduate students and a similar number of computer science students explored these questions while they created potentially industry changing applications.

In a class I co-directed with Dr. Kris Hammond and Dr. Larry Birnbaum from Northwestern University’s InfoLab five cross-disciplinary teams built these five exciting projects, this was how the students described them in their final report:

• Machine Generated Sports Stories (aka. StatsMonkey): an application that automatically writes sports stories based on box scores
• News Feed: an iPhone application that presents users with stories of a particular length and topic depending on how much time they have to read
• EasyWriter: a Microsoft Word plug-in that automatically brings up Internet search results alongside a document based on highlighted text
• Tweedia: a widget that can be incorporated into a news Web site to enable readers to see real-time tweets related to an article
• Twitter Publishing: programming that allows Twitter users to automatically receive relevant news links based on their tweets