At a Glance
Redesigning mobile content discovery for a technology news experience.
Context
Role
Product Designer
Timeline
4 weeks
Platform
iOS & Android
TechCrunch lacked a dedicated mobile app, requiring readers to rely on its mobile website to consume technology news on the go. I explored how a native mobile experience could make discovering, navigating, and reading technology news more personalized while giving readers greater control over the content they follow and consume.
The concept focused on creating a more persistent relationship between readers and TechCrunch through personalized recommendations, saved content, reading history, followed authors, and notifications.
Design Opportunity
How might we make TechCrunch more personalized on mobile, helping readers discover relevant stories while giving them more control over what they follow and read?
The Design
I designed the experience around two connected ways of helping readers build a more personalized relationship with TechCrunch: Discover, and Personalize.
Feature 1
Discover
Two ways to discover what matters
The redesigned experience separates what's happening across TechCrunch from what's relevant to each reader.
Home
Stay current with the latest news. Home provides a broad entry point into TechCrunch, surfacing current stories and editorial coverage across the publication.
For You
Make TechCrunch your own. For You brings together Saved Articles, Reading History, and Recommended for You in a single personalized hub, combining what readers explicitly choose with what the system can surface for them.
Feature 2
Personalize
Let readers shape what they see
Personalization extends beyond recommendations. Readers can actively signal what matters to them through following authors, saving articles, and revisiting their reading history.
Article
Make every story a starting point for personalization. The article experience gives readers lightweight ways to shape their future experience without interrupting the core reading flow.
Follow Authors
Follow the voices you value. Following an author gives readers a direct way to shape the content they encounter and creates a persistent relationship between the reader and the writers they care about.
Next Steps
Extending Personalization
Let readers shape what they see
The same personalization model could extend beyond individual authors.
Following Topics
Allowing readers to follow topics such as AI, startups, or venture capital would give them another way to explicitly shape their interests while creating an additional signal for personalized recommendations.
Following topics could also open the door to topic-specific notifications, helping readers stay informed about subjects they care about without relying solely on a general news feed.
Reflection
Personalization is more than a recommendation feed
This project pushed me to think about personalization as a system of signals and user-controlled actions, rather than a single “For You” experience.
Recommendations can make discovery more relevant, but actions like following, saving, and reading history give users a way to actively shape that experience. Designing those relationships helped me think more critically about how products can become more personalized without making the experience feel opaque or overly automated.