Business Insider India

The problem

Business Insider’s mobile experience carries a dense information architecture — articles, markets, video, newsletters — all competing for attention. Publisher apps often feel like responsive websites in a native shell: scroll stutters, gestures fight the platform, and reading hierarchy gets lost in chrome.

At Times Bridge, the question wasn’t can we redesign BI India? It was what does this product feel like when it’s truly native? — before the org committed to a direction.

What I owned

As Lead Product Designer, I built a high-fidelity SwiftUI prototype — feed, reading view, gestures, and transitions — to pressure-test IA and editorial hierarchy with real affordances, not slides.

What I built

Article feed

A LazyVStack with custom card components. Each card has a parallax image header that responds to scroll position, and text that scales with the user’s accessibility settings. No manual layout hacks — SwiftUI handles the structure.

Reading view

The article transition uses matchedGeometryEffect to expand the card into a full reading view. The image grows to full-width, the headline repositions, and the body text fades in — one fluid motion instead of a push navigation.

Pull interactions

Pull down to refresh with haptic feedback. Pull from the left edge to go back with a preview of the previous screen. Native behaviors customized through SwiftUI’s gesture system.

Design engineering

Prototype as argument

Editorial apps break when product navigation competes with content hierarchy. The prototype let stakeholders argue with scroll, back, save, and density on a phone — not with static comps.

Native affordances first

When scroll performance is guaranteed and gestures feel right automatically, you spend less time fighting the platform and more time on the reading experience itself.

Performance as design input

I used Instruments to profile scroll on device. Jank in the feed wasn’t an engineering ticket later — it changed card structure and image loading early.

Results

The SwiftUI build became the reference for native IA and motion in BI India discussions — a concrete direction for feed density, reading transitions, and system integration before production commitment.

What I learned

Native frameworks change what you design

Guaranteed scroll and gestures free you for hierarchy — you stop fighting the platform and start designing the reading experience.

Editorial hierarchy is navigation

The job is often what to withhold, not what to add — chrome that competes with content kills publisher apps.

matchedGeometryEffect is a product decision

Shared-element transitions are continuity, not polish — they define how readers move from feed to article.

Tools

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  SwiftUI — layout, navigation, gestures, accessibility