This Sat­urday at the Touch the News design chal­lenge at the Moz­illa Fest­ival, I was in team 6 with Heather Les­son, Peter O’Shaughnessy, Carlo Frinolli, Nick Smith, Gavin McFar­land and Chris War­ring.

We focused on how people con­sume news on the iPad with regard to loc­a­tion, time of day and time avail­able to spend on news.

We dis­cussed on the needed changes in font sizes and lay­out needed for vari­ous read­ing pos­i­tions, dis­cussed Craig Mod’s Bib­lio­type art­icle (A List Apart: A Sim­pler page) and pro­to­type.

Then we dis­cussed how the news site could use time of day and loc­a­tion as inform­a­tion to learn from vari­ous user set­tings (font sizes, lay­out) to what cat­egor­ies of news the user is read­ing at home, work, in the morn­ing, etc. to adjust accord­ingly the sug­ges­tions of related articles.

The major issue we tackled with was: given a known time to spend with the iPad (while com­mut­ing, etc.) how do you choose what to read? How do you know what can be read in that time?

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