Year
2023
Client
CNN
PROJECT TYPE
REDESIGN
CNN’s mobile app sees 3.3 million daily unique visitors—of which, 75% engage with the Top News section.
User engagement stalled and the current experience wasn’t guiding users deeper into the breadth of CNN’s content—limiting content discovery and retention.
This mirrored a broader challenge across CNN Digital, where more than 70% of visits were "one and done."
Design a best-in-class homefeed experience that makes the app feel more intuitive, engaging, and habit-forming.
We redesigned Top News around three validated ideas: a combined Search + Explore tab, a simplified navigation, and a homefeed built for storytelling — hero moments, snackable content, and in-feed sections that let users go deeper without losing their place.
The redesign launched alongside a full CMS migration onto CNN's new Vossi design system, giving CNN a scalable foundation to keep shipping on top of.
In mid-2022, I co-led a company-wide design sprint with Jason Culler to answer one question: how might we drive toward a best-in-class mobile navigation and homefeed experience?
Over six months — workshops, competitive benchmarking against apps like the New York Times and Bloomberg, and 50+ user interviews — we turned that question into a validated set of concepts and a Now/Next/ Later roadmap.
The Now-phase concepts became the foundation for the Top News redesign, which shipped alongside a full CMS migration onto CNN's new Vossi design system.
I co-led the design sprint and owned the end-to-end process for the Top News redesign that followed.
We reimagined the top news feed in a design sprint through workshops, competitive analysis, and user studies, then led the Top News redesign it shaped, contributing design system components and aligning Editorial, Personalization, A/V, and Engineering.
The design sprint's objective was to improve the mobile app navigation and Top News homefeed experience so users could discover more content and engage more often.
This research phase focused on broadly understanding end-users' needs and pain points related to navigating and consuming content on CNN's app. We did that through cross-functional workshops, competitive benchmarking of best-in-class news and non-news apps, and five user studies (one moderated, four unmoderated) with 50+ participants.
What we learned - Four themes shaped everything that followed: -
Digital Natives expect news that is timely, personalized, and visually engaging
News routines that span social, search, and aggregators raise the bar for personal relevance
Concepts built on recommendations, personalization, and storytelling resonated most
The homepage should surface what matters most at first glance and keep people engaged as they read
The design sprint didn't just inform the redesign — it prioritized it.
Of the concepts tested and scored during the sprint, the Now-phase roadmap directly became the Top News redesign's feature set: the combined Search + Explore tab, simplified navigation, and storytelling-driven homefeed modules all moved from validated concept to shipped feature in the same initiative.
The redesign and CMS migration improved recirculation, discovery and engagement. Better engagement and discovery translated directly into revenue for the mobile app.
Negative app feedback dropped from 28 negative messages a day to 20.
Visits per week grew from 6.7M to 7.37M — hitting our target.
Page views per visit increased 10% across iOS and Android.
