CNN News Reader

Challenge

While working within the CNN technology team responsible for internal tools used by news and streaming content groups, I became interested in the broader CNN.com news experience. As a news junkie, I took on an independent concept project to explore how the experience could become more usable, more engaging, and more supportive of a reader's personal interests.

Approach

Because this was a self-directed exploration without access to business owners, analytics, or direct audience research, I grounded the work in competitive research and a heuristic review of the existing experience. The goal was to identify practical opportunities that could improve discovery and engagement without requiring changes to editorial content or assumed production workflows.

• Identified an opportunity to create a more cohesive experience across desktop web, mobile web, and the disconnected mobile app.
• Observed that the desktop site used one of the narrowest layouts among competitors while carrying a high article count, creating unusually dense information architecture.
• Explored a wider desktop layout that could support persistent vertical navigation, reducing reliance on difficult-to-access horizontal menus and nested submenus.
• Focused the redesign on front-end layout, interaction patterns, and feature enhancements while preserving existing content structures and production assumptions.
• Added engagement concepts for saving articles, following favorite topics, and switching between tile, list, and gallery viewing modes.
• Considered how the experience could be introduced through incremental feature releases rather than a disruptive full redesign.

The concept work was completed on my own time, so I set a strict one-week time cap for the full effort, including research, design, prototyping, and presentation materials.

Results

The final concept presented a more modern and cohesive news-reading experience that felt more like a personal, trusted information resource while reinforcing a stronger CNN brand presence. It also outlined a practical path for evolving the experience through focused layout improvements and reader-centered feature enhancements.