I have been a fan of Vox content for quite some time, but it wasn’t until my summer internship as a product designer for Vox Media that I began to wonder why Vox did not have a mobile app of its own.

Default browsers do a pretty good job at navigating and displaying the Vox.com website, but I cannot get over the fact that I had to go through third party entities to get to my interactive Vox fix (needing to open Apple Podcasts to get my Today, Explained fix, or opening up Youtube to initiate an informational explainer binge).

Surely there was value in having a one-stop-shop place for all things Vox, and so I sought to explore what this app could look like and what it could do to create a user experience that would be truly unique in the app market today.

Personalization

The app would open and land on a curated daily digest, perhaps based on the sections and topics you read or bookmark the most (with the help of cookies and tags inputted in Chorus). You could be able to swipe through a selection of stories and videos that algorithms determined would be the stories you would want to read the most – serving you what you would theoretically need before you even knew it.

I included a bulleted tl;dr summary of each story in this Today’s Picks section to let you get the gist of everything you need to know today, even if you don’t have the time to read a lengthy article or if you forgot your earbuds at home and can’t play a video in the middle of a packed subway car.

Scrolling down beyond these cards would bring up the Top Stories section featuring stories that would directly correlate with the stories highlighted on the landing screen of the website.

Ideally there would also be opportunity for the user to initiate further personalized features at whim. For example, push notifications for when specific authors or producers publish content, or a section within one’s account settings or when starting up the app for the first time where they can self-identify the sections and themes that interest them most.

Multimedia capabilities

Probably the first big idea I had when I began designing this app was to take the solely auditory experience of listening to a podcast and turn it into something more interactive and engaging.

The podcast player incorporates tapping or swiping on the display to scroll through photos, added reading, pull quotes, and fun facts that are all pertinent to that podcast episode. Having the ability to navigate relevant materials provides an interactive, fresh take on an otherwise standard audio player, it also gives the content more context while also promoting cross-content discoverability – which is always great.

In a similar but less radical vein to podcasts, the app’s video flow is fairly straightforward. Since watching a video is already immersive enough, I didn’t want to impede that immersion by incorporating unnecessary bells and whistles.

I went with using another drawer-style player after tapping “Read more” to pull up the video description or accompanying article because it felt more universal and supportive of both longer form text and two sentence descriptions, since navigating to a new page is reserved more so for stories and videos with longer form text aren’t the norm. Overall I sought to make the process of finding and playing a video as streamlined and as seamless as possible.

Lastly, to push the app’s visual storytelling capabilities, I mocked up what a graphic feature could look like on this app. There is already a lot of nuance and differences in complexity between features on web, and I can’t imagine mobile being capable of supporting complex pages with a lot of custom code; I figured having the option for editors to customize the viewing experience with full-bleed images, more freedom with typography, and flexible scrolling would still create an elevated, visual experience.

What did I learn?

While this app isn’t in production, it was still a highly gratifying learning experience! I came into this internship with a background in graphic design — without proper product experience — and never really knew much about the relationship between frontend and product design. A truly enjoyable and appealing experience is dependent upon good product and UX design practice, and I realize now that my approach to design used to be a bit arbitrary, with decisions made solely from an eye for good graphic design convention. Just as a brain cannot only use one side of itself, design isn’t great without addressing function and appearance in conjunction with one another.

I am super fortunate to have had the opportunity to work on this project with the help and support of my manager, Ramla Mahmood, and my mentor, Kat Molloy.

You can view the live prototype of this app and the rest of my screens here.