Wolftech Feeds

Introducing new and improved functions to Wolftech Feeds! A tool making journalists’ research process more efficient and interactive by gathering news stories from different sources to one place.
Publisert: 11. august 2022

Emma Hjellestad from the Wolftech-team pitching their prototype at FutureWeek22. Video: Oliver Cameron. 

Wolftech Feeds was created as a part of MIX250, the final course of Media- and Interaction design at the University of Bergen. The students Emma Hjellestad, Erling Qvale, Marina Jensen, Markus Berg Hannevik and Yiwen Jiang worked in collaboration with Wolftech to enhance their existing product, which helps journalists effectively carry out their work. Wolftech Broadcast Solutions was founded in 2011 in cooperation with TV 2 Norway. They provide a management system to improve workflow when planning and publishing for media production. 

The challenge

Imagine having a million tabs open and trying to maintain an overview of all the information you need. You forget where you read that one brilliant thing and have no idea how to get back to it. This is the reality for a lot of journalists. Journalists have a lot of manual work, tight schedules, and work with different tools. To solve this issue, Wolftech introduced Feeds: a tool that gathers news stories from different sources to one place. However, Wolftech described Feeds as a tool in its early stages and has not yet been given much attention. The challenge the students were presented with was therefore to look at how journalists do research and how they in turn could improve the Feeds tool to make the research process easier and more efficient.  

New and improved functions

Some of the main findings from their research was that it is time-consuming for journalists going through different sources to find relevant news material and inspiration and that it can be hard to keep track of interviewees and organize contact information. Maintaining overview of important information is also demanding when it is spread across several different platforms. They also found that journalists need an easier way to find reliable information on chosen topics, and to be able to collect all research tools in one system.

Based on these findings, the team developed three designs to help make the research process more efficient and interactive:

 

Dashboard: A module-based design lets the user customize their personal dashboard with a selection of widgets. Content, size, and position are entirely based on user preference.

 

 

 

Discover: Filter news stories based on user preference and display them on a map. The user can further explore the map and find other stories in the same area.

 

 

 

Keyword search: The integrated search component lets users specify the contents displayed in the “Feeds”columns. The user can sort information by top stories, newest, oldest, or alphabetically, and they can edit the column characteristics and visibility.

 

LEARN MORE:

  • Watch a video of the most important features in the Prototype HERE
  • Read the project report HERE

 


Publisert: 11. august 2022
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