A quality news app for an award-winning media company

Here’s what we did

The quality newspapers of De Tijd and L’Echo are aimed at entrepreneurs, managers, investors, decision-makers… in short: people who take initiative. For them, De Tijd and L’Echo are an indispensable tool, on paper and digitally.

To adapt to today’s fast-paced and omniscient digital ecosystem, Mediafin wanted to reimagine the experience on their mobile applications for De Tijd and l’Echo from scratch.

Best of both worlds

When our partnership with Mediafin started in 2019, we immediately felt that our core values resonated with theirs.

In close collaboration with the Product Owner and designer of Mediafin, our team’s mission was and is to ensure that the quality and premium feel of their brands were tangible throughout both mobile applications.

Our mobile journey

From multiple solutions to 1 React Native app

At the start, Mediafin faced the challenge of having multiple existing applications that were hard to maintain and innovate with. The decision was made to start from scratch with one highly maintainable and performant React Native codebase to deploy on both Android and iOS.

Since the premium character of the brands “De Tijd” and “l’echo” had to be reflected throughout all of their channels, performance and stability of their mobile app was our first priority.

Core components reimagined

We reevaluated the functionalities and rebuilt every page to smoothen the overall user experience and make Mediafin’s qualitative image shine. Because the media industry evolves very rapidly, we continued to adapt design and user experience to the latest trends and needs. A new push notification system was implemented.

Multiple new components were added, among which a new component with article suggestions based on a reader’s preferences. In order to incorporate third-party insights, a way to showcase promoted content was introduced.

Quality news on all devices

Since subscribers of De Tijd and l’echo have different needs and preferences and different ways of consuming content, we developed a complete overhaul of the reading experience on tablet, making full use of the larger screen real estate.

Along with the release of new daily podcasts from De Tijd and L’Echo in 2022, we developed a podcast player into the application along with Android Auto/Apple Carplay integration to cater to the needs of users that listen while driving.