(Re)building The Atlantic on iOS

DJ Brinkerhoff
Building The Atlantic
3 min readAug 23, 2017

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We’re launching a new iOS app today! We’ve partnered with the top notch team at Lickability to rebuild our app from top to bottom and have ended up with a modern, fast, and beautiful reading experience.

Designed in house in just two months (and built in just four!), we had to be very precise about where we directed our energy. In order to ship on schedule, we utilized a lot of stock UI: tab bar, back button, list views, etc. Beyond the obvious time saving benefits, we are of the opinion that in most cases designing new interactions tends to be low leverage. Millions of people are familiar with the stock iOS paradigms, and a lot of custom UI/interactions tend to be designer hubris rather than problem solving.

Subsequently, we focused on making it much simpler to use and easier to read. Tabbed navigation adheres more closely to current users mental models and makes it easier to onboard new users. In that same vein, contextual on boarding — rather than a bunch of welcome screens — ensures that people get help and guidance when they need it and over time.

As part of our ongoing effort to improve the accessibility of our products, we are utilizing dynamic type and by default we obey the users system text size. But if you prefer a different reading size, it is easily overridden. You can also choose the body typeface: serif (Lyon Text), sans-serif (Graphik), or OpenDyslexic.

There are many more details, but below I’ve highlighted some of the top level features.

Top Stories

Just as the same content is available across viewports on the web, we wanted to maintain continuity across platforms as well. With our new app, we now syndicate the curation our editors have done on the website, presenting a unified voice about what matters right now.

Sections

App users tend to be power users. They visit multiple times per day, have favorite sections, or want to see a full list of what we’ve published on any given day. The Sections tab is for them.

Magazine

A dedicated magazine tab may seem anachronistic, but many people love the packaging and editorial judgement that a magazine represents. You can download entire issues with one tap (but you don’t have to!) or individually bookmark any story.

Saved

In a world where Pocket and Instapaper exist, app-specific bookmarking might seem unnecessary. But in our research, we found that this was one of our most loved and essential features. So we made it easier to bookmark a story and easier to manage the downloads of those bookmarks.

This is just the beginning and I’m excited to see what we build with the Lickability team in the future. (You should also read their take on the whole process.) Additionally, I need to thank my brilliant colleagues, who deserve all the credit for what we shipped: Chris Sullivan, Betsy Ebersole Cole, Jess Remington, Josh West, and Frankie Dintino. Now, go download the app and subscribe!

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