Guardian App: UX/UI Redesign
to Drive Premium Growth
Driving Engagement Through Personalisation & Content Discovery
Driving Engagement Through Personalisation & Content Discovery
The Guardian needed to grow in-year revenue by acquiring and retaining Premium subscribers. I convinced senior stakeholders that optimising app navigation could directly support this business goal, improving both discoverability and engagement with premium features.
The Guardian's digital team was structured into autonomous, cross-functional OKR squads. As the sole UX designer in my squad, I ensured the UX process was applied effectively to meet our OKR. Once we received our targets, I explored strategies to help the team achieve them.
I analysed QA feedback through a heuristic review to identify pain points. My key finding was that the premium features, Live and Discover, were not clearly tappable.
I presented the findings and hypothesis to the team, gained alignment, and wrote a UX sprint plan to guide delivery within the quarter. The plan was shared with PMs and engineers to ensure feasibility and get sign-off.
I presented my heuristic review to stakeholders from Design, Product, Engineering, Commercial, and UX. This allowed me to explore their ideas of successful navigation. I discovered they had different definitions of navigation success. To align them, I designed a scoring system to evaluate navigation concepts against agreed metrics. This system created a shared understanding and enabled consensus on project direction.
With the senior stakeholders' agreement, I organised a cross-discipline ideation workshop. By discussing the user problems and my hypothesis, we agreed on the most important navigation features and ranked them by importance.
We also agreed on the primary journeys we would promote through our new navigation. I then split the group into teams to sketch their versions of The Guardian's future navigation.
The outcome of the workshop was three navigation sketches. After the workshop, I iterated on the sketches while focusing on the primary navigation journeys, and created wireframes.
I partnered with a User Researcher to develop a testing guide. Participants evaluated the wireframes using the scoring system, revealing which navigation concept best balanced user needs and business goals.
'Navigation Concept 2' scored highest in user testing but initially faced team disagreement as the team did not view all of the user tests. I presented the scoring system and user feedback, clarifying the data and securing team alignment around a single concept.
With the team aligned on 'Navigation Concept 2' I worked with the team to design a consistent experience across iOS and Android while respecting platform guidelines (Material Design & Human Interface Guidelines). We reviewed journeys and feature handling to ensure usability and coherence across both platforms.
Competitive analysis highlighted standard bottom navigation patterns, such as home on the left and utility on the right.
I applied The Guardian's design system for colours, typography and interactions to create an aesthetically consistent and intuitive navigation.
All elements were integrated into the final UI design, ensuring clarity, accessibility, and premium feature visibility.
I collaborated with engineers to finalise usability and platform parity, updated the design system, and worked with PMs and the Data team to define success metrics, including:
Aligning stakeholders early, testing concepts with users, and using data-driven decision-making enabled a navigation redesign that directly drove measurable growth in Premium adoption.
