Have you used Flipboard today? If you have answered in the affirmative, then you would have realized that the Flipboard of today looks very different from the one that you used yesterday. The whole idea of this redesign is to help people focus on one item -- “finding passions”. This particular Flipboard update continues the main idea of CEO Mike McCue, which is to assist people in hunting down whatever topic that they are passionate about in addition to helping them meet up with other people who are equally passionate. In order to achieve this, a new range of “smart” features have been thrown into the mix.
Basically, the word “passion” is used here as the main selling point. In a nutshell for the layperson who has not used Flipboard in his or her life, Flipboard basically wants to be the Google of its generation when it comes to looking for more information on a particular topic that you already have a great amount of interest in and have a burning desire to take things to the next level. This is certainly in line with the five goals that Flipboard had set for itself earlier this year, where one of it was to help people look for a minimum of five things that they have great passion for. Yet another one of those goals would be to ensure that people who make use of the application will continue to have access to a constant stream of relevant content.
Releasing content is not the challenging part -- that would be ensuring the relevance of the content that people search for. How does Flipboard intend to bring this to pass? Well, they would first need to allow the user to experience a high degree of personalization in the user experience.
The layout has been totally revamped for the better. It is far more minimalistic in nature, and will place a greater emphasis on your cover stories and up to nine different magazine combinations, now how about that? These recommendations will be pushed to you, depending on what Flipboard thinks that you like, so if you start to find Donald Trump appearing all over the place, it is a double-edged sword. Someone who sees your Flipboard would think that you are a huge Trump supporter, or know where your political affiliation lies by understanding that you have been looking for stories that vilify the man.
Flipboard version 4.0’s changes were necessary, and Flipboard chief executive Mike McCue shared, “In Flipboard 3.0, you picked from a range of topics at the beginning, and it gave you a snacking feed. It’s great because it’s like Twitter, but you’re following topics. But the more you use the product, the more random cover stories become and people don’t use the tiles to navigate. For those that are new, they get the one shot at the beginning to personalize the product and then have to figure it out from there. The passion screen will be available all the time.”
There are also Smart Magazines that will make use of new curation techniques in order to help users hunt obtain information that is relevant to them. Do check out the new Flipboard revamp today and see whether you might start to make more use of it than before.
