One Of My Favorite iOS Apps

 About a year ago now, I came across an iOS app called Particle, which a news app that lets the user customize what news they want to see! For this post, I want to go over how the app looks, the functionality of the app, and the usability. Along with that, there are a couple of things I would change about the app if I could, but I will save that for last.

Design

The app itself has a very sleek design that is quite easy to navigate. When opening the app, you immediately see a couple of articles pop up with a little "Good morning/evening/afternoon" message at the top. 

As seen, there a couple of navigation buttons that can be pressed at the bottom. From left to right, the buttons are as follows: Feed, Explore, Search, and Activity. As seen, one of the subjects I personally follow quite a bit are sports, but this can vary between what you personally follow. All of the articles are easy to follow, and the subjects in the Search tab are color-coded to help users identify different subjects. 

Functionality

The functionality of this app is to get news about things that the user cares about, but in a way that is not one-sided. The way that Particle does that is bring together any article it can find, and summarize the main points of the articles that it finds. 

As an example, in the photo on the left of the Feed page, there is an article about the NFL team, the Cleveland Browns, releasing Ogbo Okoronkwo and signing Kicker Andre Szmyt. If you look just above that title, there is information about how many articles reported on this, which in this case is 7. This is where the main use of the app comes in. If I were to tap on any article like that one, this is what is going to pop up:

From this sports article, you can see the summary in the middle, and if you look at the bottom, there is also the number of articles that they used to create that summary. Those articles that are listed can be interacted with to see the articles that they used, which can help visualize how the summary became what it is.

Also at the bottom, there is a button that says "Ask Question," where you can tap and ask whatever you want about that article, and Particle's AI engine can search the web for an answer.

Another really awesome thing that this app can do is reword the article, which is handy for someone who does not understand the article or needs it reworded to understand. By tapping on Overview in that same article, these buttons pop up:

Now you can reword it to make it easier to understand, and visualize the opposing opinions about the subject of the article, in this case how this basketball player can help make an impact on his team, as well as a couple of other functionalities for this app. 

Usability

The usability for this app is great, and using an AI engine for this purpose is really handy. This app can apply to anyone, no matter what they follow or how they identify, either politically or socially. You also do not have to risk seeing things you do not want either, and you can change it at any point by clicking the profile picture, and then going to "Content Preferences." From there, you can customize what you do and do not want to see, with a design like this:

From there, you can hit the + or - buttons on either side to adjust how often (or how not as often) you'd like to see certain types of content. You can even do this by hitting "topic tuner" at the top and you can swipe right/left on content you'd like or not like to see, which is very easy to understand. 

One of my favorite features though is that it will read summaries of articles in a podcast-esque style. If you look at the first set of pictures in the "Feed" page, there is a little play button the top that, when you hit it, reads your suggested articles for you. 

With this though, there are are a couple of things that I'd change. One is definitely putting this on the Google Play Store and bringing this to Android. 

Another thing is differentiating the Feed and Explore tabs, with putting a topic selector in the Explore tab of topics that you do follow. 

The last thing I would change is adding a system where the users can have a context system too, so if an article has some form of misinformation or a mistake, the community can help correct or add context to it too.