As someone interested in both software development and design, the two sites that I visit frequently are Hacker News and Designer News. I thought it would be great if I had to go to one single page to access the information of both sites. Hence I built Builder News, which is a Hacker News and Designer News aggregator.

The live site can be found at http://yangshun.im/builder-news.

Builder News is a Hacker News and Designer News aggregator. It shows the top links from each site and allows users to save their favourite links locally in their browser. I created the Hacker News and Designer News API using Kimono Labs and displayed the combined content in one single page.

• Combined content from Hacker News and Designer News
• Bookmarking features
• Shows which links you have read

• At least 3 different page designs:

  • Home page
  • Favourites page
  • About page
  • Settings page

• 3 Different UI Components

  • Navigation List
    • Main List on Home page
  • Segmented Panel
    • "News Type" Selector on Home page
  • Popup
    • Favourite a link by pressing the star icon on a link.
    • Press the star icon again.
    • The popup will be shown to ask the user to confirm their decision to remove the favourited link.
  • Search bar
    • On the favourites page, the user is able to filter the links by typing in the search box.

• Includes a setting page or a page with form components

  • Settings page
    • Default news type segmented panel
    • Maximum number of items in feed slider
  • Favourites page
    • Search box

• The app can display content dynamically
  • The feed is populated from a Hacker News and Designer News API that I built using Kimono Labs.
• Settings or form components could modify the app's behaviours
  • Has a segmented panel to display the default category of news to display upon load of the site.
  • Has a slider to adjust the maximum number of items shown in the feed.
  • Search box on favourites page to filter out favourites

• Usability of the app
  • There are no complex user interactions in the page and it is simple to use.
  • The interface is not cluttered and makes use of conventional mobile app layouts.
  • A confirmation popup is presented to the user in case the user accidentally unfavourites a link.
  • After a user has clicked on the link, it is permanently marked as read as shown by the green "Read" text. This helps the user to keep track of which links he has not read.

By Tay Yang Shun (A0073063M)