Hackastory

Why should I care

Why should I care? will be a webpage made for young people and others who are short on time and even shorter on attention spans, but are interested in news. We take complex stories and turn them into easily digestible, interactive pieces that will explain why it’s important for them to understand difficult to read, boring, or long pieces of news. We want more people to read the important news stories, no matter how complex they seem.

>>Try the prototype (works best on mobile)<<

Why sould I care

Technologies
The webapp is build on HTML/CSS and Javascript so it works on every webbrowser. We choose to develop it for mobile because we found out most people check the news on their phone. That descision enabled us to insert some playful interactive elements like tapping, swipe-ing and dragging. In the development we used Zepto.js and Interact.js to make this possible.

– HTML/CSS (Sass)
– Google Developer Tools for local mobile testing
– Javascript and JS libraries (zepto.js, interact.js and jquery)

Hackastory’s first all women hackathon group
Team Why should I care - hackastory cape town

BIGGEST INSIGHT:

It’s difficult to always understand why it’s important for people to read certain stories as well as the effect of the stories are not always clear. It was also interesting to realise that the way in which we tell stories today don’t seem to have the basic understanding of audience need before being written. Today news is written to bring news, but no thought has been given to the way it’s given to the audience. This could be why so few young people read the news: it’s not relevant to them. A lot of small bits and pieces are forgotten along the way, and we realise we need to fill them in as the project continues.