Oracle/CNN Custom News
 

Client Objective:

In 1996, Oracle was exploring a strategic partnership with CNN to create a personalized online news service. Oracle's goal was to increase its brand recognition within the consumer marketplace and position the company as a leader in information delivery and management. To cement its partnership with CNN, Oracle desired a prototype that demonstrated the feasibility and capabilities of this new type of service.

vivid Implementation:

vivid studios developed a prototype that demonstrated how a personalization system would fit within the current CNN site. vivid created a new user interface that focused on the interaction and visual design of the user experience, and the seamless integration of that experience into the existing CNN website. To distinguish from among the many user groups, vivid explored feature sets and drafted complex user scenarios. Once the user groups were identified, vivid defined various patterns of use, use environments, and levels of desired interaction and content retrieval. vivid then began visual development, co-branding the site and developing the CustomNews concept. vivid and Oracle engineers and product managers designed a content taxonomy that accommodated deep levels of preference setting and personalization. vivid also designed pre-selected news filters for those users who did not want to undergo the preference setting process.

Complex features such as a news clipping service, and live weather, stock and news feeds were embedded within a Java ticker. User portfolio data is password protected, and cookies record user preferences so the site can serve up personalized pages to mobile and remote users.

In 1997, CNN and Oracle used the vivid prototype as the foundation for successfully launching CustomNews, which is one of the most popular news sites online today.