ESPN STARS
A native Android app serving region-specific sports news to the Eastern Pacific, Indonesia included — built for the handsets and bandwidth people there actually had.
Numbers
- 3
- Team size
- 4 months
- Build time
Problem
ESPN needed to serve sports news to fans in Singapore and Indonesia, where the audience and the devices were both different from the US ones its existing products were built around.
The project also lost its mobile developer partway through, which is how I came to it.
Solution
A custom native Android application built for regional news, templating the content with Mustache so the feed could change shape without a release.
Analysis
Inheriting a half-finished Android project means postponing every feature conversation. I got the build back into a shippable state first, then cleared what the client had already found wrong with it, and only then talked about what it should do next.
Templating the content made the rest survivable. Hard-coding each content type means a new binary every time editorial wants a different layout, and editorial always wants a different layout.
Result
Taken from an unshippable state to deployment, serving sports data across a wide range of news topics for Singapore and Indonesia.
Photos
Regional news first. The point was Indonesia, not a US feed with a different flag on it. 