Evolving the Inshorts App Experience Through System Thinking
Inshorts is India’s leading short-news app, delivering verified stories in a strict 60-word format to millions of daily readers. The product’s value relies on speed, clarity, and a minimal, interruption-free reading flow - making UX decisions around depth, continuity, and simplicity critical.
Why Inshorts Needed a System-Level Redesign
As the audience grew and user behaviour shifted to fast, swipe native consumption, the original experience began to show strain. Reading sessions flattened, continuity gaps appeared during fast moving news cycles and the overall system lacked the structures needed for deeper exploration and daily return.
Where the Experience Needed Reinforcement
• Users dropped off around the seventh or eighth story
• The feed felt flat and unstructured as content volume increased
• Major evolving topics felt fragmented and hard to follow
• Daily return behaviour had no natural anchor points
• Personalisation felt unclear
• New UX patterns were needed for scale, not patches
Strategic Levers That Guided the Redesign
As the product scaled, it became clear that Inshorts needed more than incremental UI updates. Together with product, editorial and engineering leadership, we established a set of strategic levers that would guide the redesign across multiple phases.
I played a key role in shaping these levers by surfacing recurring user problems, framing UX constraints, and translating the high level direction into actionable design decisions across each phase.
These five levers formed the backbone of our system-level approach.
Solutions Designed Across Phases
Strengthening the Reading Flow (App Experience Core)
Redesigned the app with improved navigation and readability.
Introduced Spaces (tab-like areas for live events, topics, and marketing campaigns).
Increased visibility & accessibility of live/seasonal events.
Enabled marketing team to leverage “Spaces” as flexible engagement surfaces.
Enhanced engagement with core interactions like save and share, making them more accessible and intuitive.
Rolled out gradually → early 1% tests showed strong adoption → scaled to 100% users.
Creating Personalised Feed (Personalisation)
Users frequently complained about irrelevant shorts, exposing gaps in personalization.
Designed flows for topic and language preferences, “see more/less like this,” and mute/follow controls. Tested prototypes to check if users understood and trusted these settings.
Challenge: We realized the core issue was backend-driven — different cohorts were on different app versions and UIs, making quick UI fixes ineffective.
The UX layer was validated (clear, low-friction controls, recoverability, better trust messaging). Backend teams later used our design specs for staged experiments.
Personalization needs strong design + tech collaboration; while design ensured usability, actual feed accuracy relied on backend algorithms.
Introducing a Community Layer
Through user research, we identified a need for a layer of engagement around certain topics, beyond just reading.
Designed a dedicated community section for like-minded individuals to interact on trending topics.
Features included upvoting/downvoting, threaded commenting, and replies to comments.
Created a social layer within Inshorts to drive discussions while staying tied to news context.
Bringing Continuity to Evolving Stories (Timelines)
Upon user research and usability sessions, we discovered that multiple shorts could exist for a single event but lacked a connection, creating confusion.
Conceived Timelines to tie related shorts together and show how major events progress over time.
For trending stories, users could view a chronological chain of updates.
Improved clarity and context by helping users follow evolving news narratives.
Strengthening Daily Behaviour (Rituals)
A gamified approach to build a consistent reading habit.
Every day at 7 PM, users received a curated ritual: key updates from the last 24 hours.
Users could complete rituals across multiple topics, earn streaks, and take short quizzes.
Incorporated AI summarization of events to streamline reading.
Encouraged repeat visits and deeper engagement.
Additional Experiments
Gamification experiments such as reading streaks, badges, and daily rituals were tested to encourage habit formation.
These were supported with micro-interactions like smooth swipe transitions, animated save/share, and subtle progress indicators that rewarded users in tiny moments. Together they helped drive delight and reinforce return behavior.
Ran numerous other prototypes and experiments around discovery, notifications, and content exploration.
Many were sunset after testing, but each contributed critical insights into user behavior and preferences.
Process Highlights
Research: User interviews, app reviews, analytics (drop-off after 8 stories).
Testing: Prototypes tested regularly; usability testing became a standardized process at Inshorts. Incorporated UAT (User Acceptance Testing) assessments to ensure quality across multiple dimensions.
Collaboration: Early dev involvement ensured design–dev compatibility and smooth handoff.
Cross-functional: Worked with marketing/content on copy, especially for onboarding and streak gamification, and collaborated on localization for other language copy to ensure consistency and cultural fit.
Impact
Reflection and Learning
The redesign highlighted the importance of pairing simplicity with discoverability — Spaces created new avenues for engagement while preserving the core speed of the product.
Experiments like Community, Timelines, and Daily Rituals emphasized how structured layers of engagement can enrich the experience when aligned with user needs.
Micro-interactions showed that delight at small touchpoints plays a big role in forming habits and improving satisfaction.
Establishing testing practices like usability studies and UAT as a recurring part of the process improved quality and confidence in design decisions.
Early collaboration with development and marketing teams underscored the value of cross-functional partnership for faster iteration and more cohesive product outcomes.
Conclusion
This project was a journey of balancing Inshorts’ minimalist DNA with new avenues for engagement. Through redesigns, experiments, and cross-functional collaboration, I helped evolve the product from being a quick news app into a more habit-forming and interactive platform.
