CBS News Breaking News

Users trusted CBS News and kept coming back. The app just couldn’t turn a breaking story into something they could read in seconds.

The CBS News app had strong live coverage and push notifications that pulled users in, but no information architecture for breaking news. Alerts and browsing alike dropped people onto the home screen or a long article, and although users kept returning, sessions were short, and they rarely stayed. My role was to design that missing architecture, so both notification and browse users could see what happened, whether it was still happening, and what it meant for them, fast.

Two users, one frustration. Around half of users came in through the News tab to browse, scrolling for what mattered today but meeting poorly organised, repeated content. The rest arrived from push notifications, each tap a breaking alert with the expectation of immediate information. Instead they landed on the home screen or a long article. App store reviews and user research told the same story: people felt they were wandering randomly, alerts were slow to open, and the same stories repeated hour after hour.

The trust gap. Users saw CBS News as a trustworthy source, but far fewer found it easy to navigate or felt it gave them the most up to date headlines. The trust was there; the experience was failing to deliver on it. People kept coming back and left quickly. That is a design problem, not a content problem, and the answer was a clear information architecture for breaking news, organised by urgency, impact and scope.

The problem and approach are open above. The full work stays private: the competitive IA analysis, the breaking news categorisation framework, the high-fidelity designs, components and prototype, plus the slide deck. Available with an access code. Happy to share with recruiters and teams.