Introducing Mic for iPhone: Lock-screen storytelling with video
News is inherently about speed. “Hot off the press” is a cliche for a reason. Today, the demand for fast and important information drives us to check our phones more than 150 times per day. We designed the new Mic app to answer this demand.
When iOS 10 introduced rich notifications this summer, we saw a huge opportunity for speeding up news consumption. Using the iOS 10 Beta, we got into the habit of 3D Touching iMessage notifications and replying from the lock screen. We’ve almost never opened the iMessage app since. We saw that this low-friction user experience held an opportunity for faster storytelling.
For this reason, the new Mic app — an update to MicCheck — delivers news to users entirely within notifications. You can get a video briefing or news summary instantly by 3D Touching the alert in the lock screen. No need to open the app at all.
We see this as a big reduction in friction for mobile news consumption. With traditional news apps, you receive a notification, swipe it to open, launch the corresponding app, load the article or video and then consume. With Mic on iPhone, you get the notification and consume the story directly upon 3D Touch.
Of course, the flip-side of notifications is that they can get annoying really quickly. This is where “tuning” comes into play. We let new users of the app pick the topics they’re interested in — coarse tuning — but over time we use iOS 10’s rich notification actions to fine-tune notifications for each user. These custom actions allow us to get a lot more granular feedback from each person we notify. It means that over time, we can train the algorithm to push you only the content you’re actually interested in.
In this light, we see “the feed” as a soon-to-be outdated interface. Since Google organized the web, our experience of the internet has shifted from “push” to “pull.” Users increasingly expect the internet to tell them what they should know, at the moment they should know it; users don’t want to have to ask for each specific piece of information. We built the Mic app to get ahead of this.
Mic is betting big on notifications. We’ve already seen 50% month-over-month growth on web push since this spring. With Mic for iOS, we’re taking this format to the next level.
Download Mic from the App Store. (It’s free.)
