Screen capture of the Flexible Content Display prototype on a Surface using the arrow keys to move between stories. (In one build we did truncate the abstract with an ellipsis, but ultimately this was deemed too computationally expensive.) My role: prototyper.

Engaging & versatile layouts for Windows apps

Several of the AMP apps hosted news experiences with current stories relevant to the app, such as business news in the Finance app. Our research showed that when the layout was regular or predictable, users would spend less time and pan less far in those views. We were challenged to produce a layout for varying content across all devices that encouraged engagement and showcased the apps’ diverse content.

While building the stories collection component, we wanted a way to arrange a large collection of stories of varying content; some had images not all of which needed to be displayed, all had headlines and bylines, and we wanted to support a varying amount of text from the story’s abstract, if available.

I led the engineering effort to build an algorithm for computing a new layout, which leveraged the new Flexbox CSS spec and ultimately resulted in our patent application for “Flexible Content Display”, which essentially weighs the content available and the space it would occupy against the canvas space available and the need for variety.

With this new layout, research showed a positive effect on panning distance and time spent in the view.