WashingtonPost.Newsweek Interactive (WPNI), one of the nation’s most respected news organizations, was seeking a way to connect with younger audiences and take advantage of emerging media and technologies to increase outreach.

The Challenge

Develop a native iPhone application to be launched simultaneously with the official Apple Appstore launch. Concurrently work with the existing WPNI team in a separate agile web development project consisting of three, month-long sprints.

The Solution

The Washington Post contacted BrowserMedia several months before the planned Apple Appstore launch to begin brainstorming and development of a native iPhone application using the just-released iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK). Our information architects, strategists and software developers worked with WPNI to create the first Washington Post iPhone application, the “City Guide.” The application allows users to browse and search thousands of DC metro area restaurants, bars and clubs by name, neighborhood, type of cuisine and price range. In addition, the application takes advantage of the geolocation capabilities of the device to show venues “near me” while providing interactive maps of matching locations. The City Guide application makes use of the unique content that the Washington Post has developed over time, in the form of easily accessible reviews from their expert food and entertainment writers.

While the development of the City Guide native application was underway, the WPNI team urgently required supplemental staff to support its development team in order to meet internal deadlines for related web-based initiative: The Going Out Guide. WPNI required a team of web developers to work with its existing teams of web programmers, designers, QA, and business teams. WPNI had a tight internal deadline and required experienced staff who could integrate quickly into their processes and provide ongoing development services. The BrowserMedia team consisted of four fulltime development staff who were tasked with building working HTML templates from PDF wireframes. The team used CSS, XHTML, Java, jQuery, Tomcat, Maven, Subversion, and Eclipse IDE throughout the project. All developers were onsite at the WPNI office for the first several weeks of the effort, then provided additional development offsite.

This Agile project included daily scrum meetings and interaction with a project lead, a team of 12-15 programmers, a design team, a business team, and the QA team. One WPNI developer was paired with the BrowserMedia team for the duration of the project.

The Results

The City Guide iPhone application launch coincided with Apple’s Appstore launch, as planned, and was one of the most quickly adopted apps in the store. The Going Out Guide project was also a success. The BrowserMedia team was able to efficiently fill a void in the WPNI structure and assisted tremendously in helping to meet very tight development deadlines.