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From overwhelm to clarity: redesigning SmartNews’ first-time user experience
Overview
To tackle low onboarding completion rates, I redesigned SmartNews’ first-time user experience to reduce complexity and focus on user intent. This change helped new users find relevant news faster and increased participation by over 20%.
My Role
Product Designer (UI/UX)
Timeline
Aug - Oct 2025 (3 months)
When new users opened SmartNews for the first time, they were met with hundreds of categories to choose from. But most didn’t know what they wanted yet — they just wanted to read the news.
Instead, the onboarding became a wall of decisions.
Only 37.9% of users completed it, while the rest skipped it entirely.
We saw an opportunity:
What if we made onboarding less about choosing categories, and more about understanding intentions?
After we unearthed useful insights through usage data, inventory analysis, and user research, as a team, we gather and do a brainstorming ideas together to discover possible solution to solve the problems
So we reframed the experience around reading intentions — why users open SmartNews in the first place.
Instead of asking “What topics do you like?” we asked “What kind of news experience do you want?”
From there, we explored and tested multiple directions:
Reading intention — Let users choose their news intention, and the app curates the rest.
Dynamic curation — Group categories dynamically based on related topics.
Smart skip — Automatically select relevant categories based on demographics and trends.
Smart grouping — Reorganize existing categories into clearer topic clusters.
After discussing pros and cons of each, we decided to move forward with the Reading Intention concept as it addressed both user and business pain points most effectively.
Optional welcome page exploration
I also explored an opening intro to the app to give more delightful experience to the users as well as giving a good impression to them from the first time.
The redesigned onboarding helped users start with clarity, not confusion.
By shifting from categories to intentions, we turned an overwhelming process into a guided and meaningful first experience.
Impact & Achievements:
📈 Onboarding participation increased from 37.9% to 58.2% after the redesign.
💡 Better content delivery — Improved personalization helped SmartNews distribute relevant news earlier in the user journey.
🌎 Higher engagement — Daily Active Users (DAU) among new users rose by 5% in the first month after launch.
This project reminded us that even small improvements in first impressions can make a lasting difference — for both users and the business.
