Papr
PAPR is a simple way to read your favorite news homepages in one place. Get the latest relevent news from the New York Times, ESPN, Vogue, TechCrunch and much more. It is beautifully designed, free, and simple to use. PAPR collects all the news homepages you want — so you no longer need to move from app to app to stay informed. Follow what matters to you.
AGENCY
Kite
MY ROLE
UX/UI Designer
PROJECT MANAGER
Yon Shiff
DOWNLOAD LINK
iOS DEVELOPER
Pavel Boris
YEAR
2019
Online News Meets Social Networking
We wanted to design a “newspaper” that had a
huge social networking aspect to it. We not only
wanted major publications involved, but we
wanted our average everyday users to be involved
too. We had designed a way for the user to create
“My Papr” which allowed them to post Video,
Audio, and Text content. Friends or followers
could like and comment if they wished. You
could archive and save posts that you wanted to
come back to. After a set period of time posts
would expire and disappear, which would mean
that people would have to always be updating and
posting new and fresh content to their page,
otherwise it would be empty. We were really
basing the application to be reliant on people to
participate, bringing their own individual
personalities to the app, allowing a more eclectic
experience for everyone.
Be Big, Be Bold
Papr strives to be a reputable, go to news source and wants all of the major publications involved. It aspires to be large, so our design direction and decisions leaned towards showcasing logos in a grand way and using bold colors to really stand out. Papr is about people getting headline news from the news outlets that they love, so we wanted to represent that in a big and bold way that would be eye catching when using the application. In the Featured page shown, users can explore various publications available on Papr. One idea for generating revenue, was to create a tiered payment system, for these publishers, where higher tiered accounts get more prominent spaces on the Feature page.
Online News Minus Social Networking
We spent a lot of time trying to find the balance between curating content from our average everyday people and the major media outlets. It is very difficult to cater to both, and do it well, so we decided to scale back on all of the social media features, like allowing people without a publisherʼs account to post content. That was a major shift, because we originally wanted alot of participation from our non-media folks, but we felt that the content and layout for Papr needed
to be of a certain standard and controlled and not left up to the randomness of the people using our application. Papr is a new app and can not rely on the diligence of our users to provide reliable content. We wanted our application to be fun to use, but at the same time, we want it to be a reliable news source. We still allow bookmarking and sharing posts with others.
Simplification
We created an app where all the major publications can showcase their top news and most relevant stories. There are two types of accounts, Basic and Publisher. Anyone can sign up for a Basic account which allows you to explore all of the publishers on Papr and gives you the option to Follow them to access their pages. The user can cycle through the headlines and can read the full story by selecting the one that interests them. Papr allows you to also save posts, and to Like and Share. Users with Basic
accounts simply follow their favorite news sources and get the latest headline news.
Guiding the Experience
A Publishers account looks very similar to a Basic account, except it allows the user to post content on Papr. A Publisher account is reserved to media outlets, and can only be recieved upon approval
from Papr admins. With a Publishers account you have your own page to post content and you can simply do this by copying and pasting links from the online source. There are over 80 publishers
on Papr, from all of the major media outlets. These include the The New York Times, CNN, ESPN, Vogue, Bloomberg, Wired, Complex, Rolling Stone, TMZ and many others. Papr is organized into nine
categories - News, Sports, Fashion, Business, Tech, Food & Health, Culture, Entertainment and Design. By managing who can and canʼt post to Papr has created a much more cleaner experience for our
users.
