role
product design
with
Apple News Team
Apple Services
what
Apple News App
when
summer 2023
I was an intern on Apple News, and my task was to create a design that increased the value of the News+ Premium subscription.
INTRODUCTION
Collaborative Collections: Leveraging user curation for News+ reach
Apple News prides itself on editorial curation—we have a whole team of editors that hand picks each days articles. We also have algorithmic curation, giving our users content based on their activity.
With user curation, users can not only have agency over what they want to see but also give us information on the content they want to see as well.
STEP 1
Creating a Collection
User must be able save articles into groups.
STEP 2
Sharing a Collection
Users must be able to share those groups of articles with their contacts.
STEP 3
Expanding Reach
The articles contained in collections give us valuable information on users' reading. Collections should be part of Today.
CREATING A COLLECTION
Saving articles into collections
In News currently, a form of user curation that already exists is the Save feature. Collections allows users to saved articles into folders.
ROADBLOCK: PUSHING FORWARD SAVED
Pushing forward Saved is something News Design has proposed in the past. The feedback we usually receives it that currently saved is under utilized.
So, I reframed Saved with a focus on collaboration and expanding reach for News+ subscribers.
SHARING A COLLECTION
Significant percentage of New+ subscriptions are through iMessage entry points
Users are more likely to read an article, and therefore subscribe to it if someone they know sends it to them.
I wanted to use user-curation to improve the News+ experience through leveraging sharing.
ROADBLOCK: CONFLICTING FEATURES IN APPLE ECOSYSTEM & ADVERSITY TO "SOCIAL" FEATURES
Initially, I wanted Collaborative collections to have a stronger presence on iMessage
I felt this would lean into our stat on iMessage-related News+ entry points. But I found that this conflicted with “Shared with you” which is a separate feature by Human Interfaces.
In addition, Apple as a brand tends to be weary of social products, so I needed to find a way to design Collections to adhere to current patterns and products of the ecosystem.
SOLUTION: APPLE MUSIC
Music is such a point of pride within Apple—and just approaved collaborative playlists!
One of the strongest parts of Apple’s design is the ecosystem.
I talked to producers and PM’s at Music to understand the proposals that led leadership to approve Apple Music’s Collaborative Playlists as well as utilizing similar design system components that music does.
EXPANDING REACH
Knowing exactly what users wants to read
One of the benefits of users curating their own Collections is that we know exactly what they are interested in reading. We can have suggested articles based on every Collection.
Normalizing user-curation: Collections in Today feed
Collections are a part of a user’s primary reading experience too.
Apple analytics shows that users spend the vast vast majority of time on the Today feed—so we should treat Collections as any other section of Today,
TIMELINESS OF NEWS AS A MEDIUM
Allowing newly published articles to get in the right hands for users who we KNOW want to read them.
Instead of just having articles we’ve already saved to our Collections, we can even suggest new articles for our users.
Notifications
Users also get notifications every time their contact shares an article.
REFLECTION
"Feels like Apple"
Designing only high-fidelity. I became relentless in every detail of my design, where every pixel mattered. I picked up Sketch in the first week, sifting through coworker’s design files and detaching and rebuilding components in the Library.
Noticing trends in interactions. With time and exposure, I learned common interactions across the Apple ecosystem. Any divergence from these trends would have to bring tremendous value to the user experience.
Presenting Value
By the end of my internship, I was giving daily keynotes to my team during critiques, delivered multiple keynotes during my process to our director, Wyatt Mitchell, and gave my final keynote to VP of design for Services, Robert Kondrk.
Viewers should be able to envision my product fitting seamlessly within the Apple News ecosystem. This meant creating prototypes with perfect visuals and animations.
Time is value. I learned to create concise presentations (<7min long) thus constantly questioned the value of my designs.
Apple’s design culture also prioritizes intuitive design, which also meant mastering delivery. I practiced scripts until they felt like I was telling a story. I also learned differences in presenting to different stakeholders and saved my spec-oriented presentations for development.
Balancing business and technical needs
I learned to strategize my designs to fit business trends of the company and also negotiate with developers based on existing framework. For example, if we knew that Music was going to be releasing shared albums in iOS17, design and development can leverage similar interactions in their products.
Talking to Services product managers to understand the business and technical tradeoffs they made. This helped me understand and negotiate constraints when reviewing my designs with development.
After I finished my intern project, my internship was extended two weeks so I could finalize another existing design project for dev hand-offs, allowing me to use my newfound skills . My main task was to mediate between development and business tradeoffs to finalize a design for launch.