Yahoo’s mobile push continues. Yesterday CEO Marissa Meyer delivered a flashy keynote at CES which featured the launch of a new app called News Digest. Available only for iOS (so far) it’s a slick roll-up of the day’s top headlines. As I discovered over the 24 hours of testing, there’s a few things that separate New Digest from the news aggregation pack that make it worth a download.
First, news stories are “summarized” by a team at Yahoo. That means you get more than just a standard article. For instance, the BAFTA film nominations came out this morning (with Gravity and 12 Years a Slave leading the pack). It’s a short piece that essentially tells us what films made the cut.
Further, and what I really like about what Yahoo has done here, is the related information at the end of the article. There’s the requisite photos and videos, but also related Wikipedia articles of interest that can help lend additional background – in this case helpful, abbreviated entries for “The BAFTA trophy award” and “British Academy of Film and Television Arts”. Very convenient!
News Digest is also, as you’d expect, social. Beyond the standard iOS sharing icon, there’s also a horizontal scroll of related Tweets. It looks as though these are also curated so you get quality results.
Want to dig further on a topic? You can do so by exploring the “References” section at the bottom of each article. These are standard hyperlinks that load in an integrated browser (instead of popping open Safari).
Twice per day (morning and evening), Team Yahoo assembles a “digest” what it thinks are the top 8 stories at that particular moment. What you get is an informative cross-section of articles across a broad array of the usual news-y topics including politics, business, US News, Science, health, entertainment, and sports.
Designers employed plenty of white space. Fonts are large, clean. Color is used minimally, mostly to code various topics, a la USA Today. The back button, seen above, is even reminiscent of a Windows 8 design element (Microsoft Metro is, at least in my books, a thing of beauty).
Bottom line: Well done.
Meyer demonstrates she knows mobile. It might be a small step, but the News Digest app helps keep the Yahoo brand on our mobile devices and front of mind. Here, its space on my iPad Mini’s homescreen, next to Flipboard, is rightfully earned.
DOWNLOAD: Yahoo News Digest for iPhone, iPad (Apple App Store, free)
