Android Mobile Content App

Client
Digital Turbine

Role
Product Designer

Year
2024

The Problem

Digital Turbine was given the opportunity to pitch to a tier 1 phone carrier and the design team was tasked with creating a premium app experience from our content media product. Up to that point our product was a limited, ad-driven content app that had started showing its age. Given that this is primarily a white-label content app platform, our partners' approval and continued support was critical to the business.

Research

In order to better understand what the client meant by “premium,” my team began researching the highest rated news apps and had several key takeaways.

A lot of breathing room

Many of the apps used up to 24px of padding in between articles. This coupled with large fonts drew a users’ attention to each headline.

Seamless

Every animation was carefully crafted and timed to feel as smooth as possible. There was no wasted animation, every single one served a purpose.

Simple Navigation & Curated Content

Most of the products we reviewed had limited navigation elements. This was because the content was curated by the user during the onboarding phase, and the product's algorithm showed the user content similar to what they would click on. 

Usability testing early in our process coupled with some deep user research our team conducted the previous year allowed us to identify key features that created everyday value for our users. 


One roadblock that we faced as a team after the research phase was how to achieve the level of “smoothness” in our product, which at the time was web based. After discussions with product managers and our engineering team we decided the best way forward was to create a brand new native product in order to achieve our vision of smooth transitions and micro-interactions.


Over the next few months I attended every developer stand up, and together we reviewed animation documentation as well the progress they were making on the native app. At the same time, my team was standing up a new design system for our premium experience.

Implementation

Enhanced Onboarding Flow

  • Select content to follow

  • Provide demographic for a personalized content experience

Everyday App Experience

  • Catch up on your top stories in the For You Section

  • Navigate to dedicated sections on topics you follow

  • Read full stories and browse immersive photo galleries from our publisher partners