How NPR Designed iPad App in One Month

Here is an interesting peek into the design process for NPR’s iPad app. NPR’s Paulo Lopez and David Wright Jr. shared the development team’s experience. I found the following points interesting:

1. “It was not quite as easy to repurpose certain core iPhone app features -- the playlist, the station finder -- as we had first imagined.” NPR worked with Bottle Rocket again who developed NPR’s iPhone app.
2. “We were able to leverage a great deal of code from our recent redesign and CMS improvement. The decision to create an entirely separate instance of the site was a lot easier because of the planning infrastructure we put in place last summer.”
3. “We’re lucky to have a great team of developers who understand storytelling as well as the value of iteration and rapid prototyping.”
4. “Our research indicated that a large number of NPR listeners would also be heavy iPad users.”
5. “There were many features in the original concept that did not make it into version 1, such as landing pages for topics and a more hierarchical presentation of the day’s news on the homepage.”