SBS News
Onboarding the News app v5.0
3 min read
SBS News on iOS (App Store, opens in a new tab)SBS News on Android (Google Play, opens in a new tab)
- Role
- Senior UI Designer; temporary Design Lead for the app's UI
- Team
- SBS Experience Design team and the EDS Mobile Team
- Platforms
- iOS and Android phones, and iPad
- Launched
- 10 December 2021
Overview
I led the UI for version 5.0 of the SBS News app (new onboarding, new icons and dark mode), testing three onboarding concepts with real users before choosing one.
SBS is Australia's most diverse broadcaster, with a mission to inspire all Australians to explore, respect and celebrate our diverse world. Version 5.0 laid the foundation for parity between the News website and app, as SBS rolled out new features, including customisation, through 2022.
Impact
- +10,000 consumption hours in the week after launch, compared with the week before
- +20,000 unique visitors over the same period
- 3 onboarding concepts tested with users before one was chosen
Challenge
I joined the SBS Experience Design team to continue the UI work on version 5.0: a new onboarding series introducing the app's new landing pages (Latest News, Explore Topics and Watch Now), plus a prompt to enable notifications, a new set of icons, and dark mode. As temporary Design Lead for the UI, I worked with the EDS Mobile Team on technical requirements, quality assurance and user testing.
Testing three concepts
I designed three illustration styles for the onboarding and tested them on UserTesting.com. Testers gave detailed feedback on all three, and the clear winner was the third: a combination of vector illustration and on-screen realism, so each slide shows the real feature it describes.
Design
The final onboarding
Four slides, each pairing one short line of copy with the real screen it introduces, and a notification prompt that shows exactly what a breaking-news alert looks like.
Icons, dark mode and specs
A new icon set gave every news section, from Live Bulletin to Indigenous, Life and SBS Explains, a consistent visual language, and dark mode mock-ups carried the redesign into low-light reading. Annotated specs gave the mobile team exact spacing and type for every element.
Onboarding on iPad
The app in use
Project Reflection
Outcome
SBS News v5.0 launched on iOS and Android on 10 December 2021. In the week after launch, consumption rose by 10,000 hours and unique visitors by 20,000 compared with the week before.
What I learned
Testing concepts early settled a subjective question (which illustration style works) with evidence, and the answer was the one that showed users the real product.
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