SKY NEWS
FOR iPHONE

The interactive Academy Awards Timeline, designed specifically for Sky News for iPhone

PROJECT
Sky News for iPhone – Xcode5 Refresh

COMPANY
Sky (Comcast)

BRAND
Sky News

ORIGIN
Greater London, United Kingdom

AGENCY
Sky Creative

DESCRIPTION
Sky News Technology asked me to update and maintain the UK and International versions of the popular Sky News for iPhone app. My mission was to improve the overall experience of the app by refreshing the user interface design to ensure it was technically compliant with the latest Xcode 5 guidelines from Apple Inc. and visually consistent with their new iOS 7 flat look and feel. We only had a couple of weeks to achieve this task before submitting our app to the App Store.

Working closely with our two in-house developers, we managed to complete this task on time and on budget. I gave the iPhone app more visual consistency with the existing Sky News eco-system of applications, with a darker, sleeker and more dramatic look and feel, to match the Sky News for iPad and Sky News for Apple TV experiences. I've also kept the UI and icons simple and minimal, to allow the users to focus on the quality of the content with no visual distraction.

Both UK and International versions of the refreshed Sky News for iPhone app were released in 2014 with 4.5 million hits per day, and an audience of 750,000 to one million daily unique visitors in UK.

Before updating the app, we worked on several custom interactive infographics and web apps in HTML5, designed specifically for Sky News for iPhone and developed in few days to cover the latest news stories and to bring the iPhone app to life, like the interactive Academy Awards Timeline illustrated above and released in March 2014. This second screen experience for mobile gave our viewers the results of the Oscars® since 1929, and the latest results were updated by our Editors straight to this web app.

The pictures displayed in this case study are the property of Sky.

Update: this version of Sky News for iPhone released in 2014 is not available anymore. The Sky News for iPhone app has been updated and Sky News has been rebranded since the publication of this case study.

PORTFOLIO