WHEN The Guardian — a 200-year-old institution born from protest and purpose — decided to reimagine its app, the company didn’t want to chase trends or mimic competitors.
But it also didn’t want to pursue originality simply for the sake of being different.
During this week’s INMA Webinar, Alex Breuer, The Guardian’s executive creative director, explained how timeless design and a simple guiding principle helped the company create a dynamic, personalised app experience that provides editorial depth whilst meeting user needs.
“I do believe that originality emerges from good timeless design rather than it being a goal in itself,” Breuer noted.
“Design and UX are there to solve problems. And the technology in itself is only good if we can make that connection between that technology and our audiences to create some kind of value for them.”
With that in mind, the team embraced its simple guiding principle: Be good. Not flashy, not novel for novelty’s sake, but good in a way that endures.
Rethinking the app
The rebirth began with a quiet moment in the office of Editor-in-Chief Katharine Viner’s office.
A printed copy of The Guardian lay beside a phone displaying the app’s homepage.
Comparing the two, Breuer and Viner asked: Which better represented The Guardian as a journalistic institution?
“And we both agreed it was the newspaper,” Breuer said, pointing to the front page’s curated blend of content.
The app, by contrast, seemed to lack the opportunity of discovery.
That realisation launched a discussion about how the app could better reflect The Guardian’s journalism and the diverse interests of its readers.
The team began sketching out a new structure to rebalance the hierarchy of content.
Instead of an inverted pyramid dominated by hard news, the app would open with a “highlights container” — a curated mix of stories that might include lifestyle, culture, or opinion pieces.
“It was really important to understand what the rate of turnover of stories were,” he explained.
“Some of our journalism needs to endure on the homepage, and some needs to change very, very quickly to represent the response to the news agenda.”
It was also critical create an experience for people who visit the app multiple times a day as well as someone who only visits once a day — or less.
This shift in story placement was controversial, particularly since the newsroom worried that placing “soft stories” front and centre would “dumb down” the brand.
But user testing revealed something powerful: Readers responded with delight.
The change challenged ingrained habits, but it broadened engagement across The Guardian’s journalism:
“We did methodical testing around click-through rates and such, and we actually achieved our goal of broadening the breadth of journalism consumed across The Guardian.”
The redesign also introduced “secondary sections” within core pillars like news, sport, culture, and lifestyle.
These sections — “What to Watch”, “What to Listen To”, “What to Visit” — offered lasting value.
Instead of relying on the publishing cycle, users could reliably find answers to everyday questions.
It was a subtle shift from “being led by the publishing cycle” to provided curated content that met specific user needs.
“The goal is to say, well, I might not be interested in news or there’s nothing really going on, but I can always go to that place. I always know it’s there,” Breuer said.
Personalisation with purpose
At the heart of the redesign was a commitment to user-focused design.
The team reimagined “My Guardian”, the personalisation tab, with simplicity as its North Star.
The original version offered exhaustive options, with scrolls of tags and sections, and users found it overwhelming.
Gus Garber, head of UX, led interviews that found the abundant number of options left users paralysed and unsure where to go next.
So the team distilled the experience into intuitive steps, guiding users through selections based on consumption data and recognisable categories.
Even though this meant more steps, it felt easier because it “mimicked the thought processes that anybody would go through”.
The result was a cleaner, more engaging personalisation experience that served most users well without sacrificing depth.
Empowering the newsroom
The redesign wasn’t just for readers; it was for the newsroom.
Editors and writers needed tools that respected their time and amplified their judgment.
The new design system enabled them to build containers, curate packages and adjust layouts without relying on developers for every tweak.
It gave editorial teams more autonomy while preserving visual coherence across the app.
“What really makes a project of this scale work in an organisation of The Guardian’s size is you have to take the whole organisation with you through this moment of change,” Breuer clarified.
“You can’t just go, ‘Oh, we’re doing this now; isn’t it great?’”
One vital addition was a new functionality called Pinboard, which it added to the existing Composer CMS.
This allows the production staff to change or add images to a story easily.
Adding that functionality took an additional two months.
It could have launched earlier, but that would have meant not getting feedback from journalists, editors and others who would be using it every day.
“Part of our research was actually spending time talking to our other audience, which is our colleagues who actually work across all our production teams, across all our journalists,” he explained.
An app for the future
The redesign wasn’t a finish line; it was a foundation for what’s still to come.
Ultimately, Breuer said a key learning was that it’s all about breadth: “I think increasingly we are understanding that The Guardian is a multilayered experience.”
There is the experience that is curated by The Guardian team as well as the readers’ experience — something Breuer said is “defined by their individual choices … by where they are in their day, where they are in the week, so what you’re seeing here is the beginning of a very multilayered, personalised [experience]. I think you need both passive and active personalisation.”
But to balance the editorial view of what readers need with the reality of what readers want can be tricky: “There can sometimes be subtle differences between the two.”
However, the technologies and experiences that The Guardian is developing will help the company find that balance.
“And we can do this really quickly now,” Breuer said.
“Because of the investment in the design system at that critical moment, we now have tools to do things in days that in the past would take weeks.”