Bundle News
A personalised news reader built on respect, not algorithms.
Bundle was a personalised news reader built by Dwarf Planet, the first product I designed that ended up in millions of people’s hands every day.
Context
News apps in the early 2010s were built like conveyor belts. Endless feeds optimised for engagement metrics, not for the reader. Headlines competed for attention, meaning got lost in repetition. The bet behind Bundle was different: that a news product could feel personal again if it gave the reader the controls instead of running on autopilot.
What I designed
The reading experience and the personalisation layer. Cards, grid, and list: three views of the same Bundle, switchable depending on the moment. The grid was the heart of it, a typographic skim of every source you’d opted into, dense without being loud. “My Bundle” let people compose that feed from publishers and topics they trusted, instead of inheriting whatever an algorithm thought they’d click.
Photography led, typography did the work, chrome got out of the way. The reader, when you opened it, gave a story the page; the editorial weight of what was inside had room to land before you swiped to the next.
International from the start. Country and language selection let one product serve a reader in Istanbul and one in San Francisco without translating its design intent. Same shell, different sources underneath.
The trade-off
The growth playbook for news apps was loud: aggressive notifications, gamified streaks, “trending” badges, algorithmic surprise. We chose the opposite stack: slow, quiet, source-led personalisation that put the reader in charge of what arrived. The cost was a slower onboarding curve; readers had to do a little work upfront to shape their feed. The trade was a product that didn’t feel like it was performing for them, which mattered more for a thing they’d open every morning.
What it changed
Grew to over a million monthly active users and 80M monthly page views, doubling the user base every year since launch. Editor’s Choice on Google Play, top-three at the Webrazzi Awards in 2016, pre-loaded on Apple Store demo devices in several countries. Partnerships with The New Yorker, The New York Times, TechCrunch, Bloomberg, National Geographic, Euronews, and dozens of regional outlets across 18 countries.
More than the numbers, Bundle taught me that ritual scales. A small daily habit, designed with care, can quietly become part of millions of mornings.
Role
Lead Product Designer. Owned the reading experience, personalisation flows, and interface foundation; partnered with the Dwarf Planet team on growth and brand expression as the product expanded internationally.