Nexis News search app

redesign

At LexisNexis, I joined a team of mobile developers led by a product manager to redesign the Nexis News Search app. Initially identified as a product that just needed to be migrated from the old company platform to the new platform and given a new design “skin,” I saw this as an opportunity to greatly improve the app’s usability and functionality. The app is fairly simple. Users are able to search for news articles and view them, with the option of emailing them. The UI of the old app was very outdated, and its workflow was clunky and confusing for such an app. Below are screenshots of the old app, with some annotations regarding its design.

design inspiration & improvements

After several rounds of mockups and iterations with the developers and a visual designer, along with inspiration from other apps like Amazon, LinkedIn, and Etsy, we decided on our final design, which placed the search bar on every screen so that the user could easily modify their search from any point in their flow. I also recommended that the filters, instead of living on the same screen as the search bar, be separated so that the user wasn’t forced to see them whenever they modified their search. Adding or modifying filters was now optional and accessed by a filters icon next to the global search bar. I thought that made a lot of sense instead of forcing them back to a full search screen. We also built space into the first search screen for news images in future releases, with the plan to push the design further and make this a really attractive and useful app. Here are screenshots of the newly designed app, which was released November 1, 2019 in the US.