Irish Times Mobile
Rebuilding the mobile reading experience for Ireland's most-read news publisher, at a point where digital subscriptions had to work and the editors' workflow couldn't change.
Print was declining, the subscription business had to carry more weight, and readers had a lot of other places to get their news — Google News, Flipboard, INKL, The Guardian. A good mobile experience had stopped being a nice-to-have.
The constraint that shaped the project: whatever we designed could not disrupt how editors already worked. We were redesigning the reading experience, not the newsroom.
What I did
I coordinated the research, facilitated the workshops and ran the testing across the six months.
To get the team from a blank page to something testable, I ran an Applied User Story Mapping workshop — a version of story mapping that pushes the conversation towards user needs rather than feature lists. Five designers, three days, a set of design hypotheses we could actually go and check.
We didn’t have the resources for the research those hypotheses needed, so I secured budget and brought in the UX agency Graphic Mint to facilitate a week-long testing sprint. I set and owned the research goals: wayfinding, engagement, and whether people simply liked the new look and could use the new navigation.
Recruitment mattered more than I expected. I surveyed our reader panel to build a pool of 200+, then filtered deliberately for a mix — subscribers and infrequent readers, every age bracket, weighted towards our core 25–35 mobile audience — specifically to avoid recruiting people who would agree with us.
Afterwards I went through five and a half hours of tape, pulled the recurring themes onto post-its, and got the whole project team adding their own before we grouped and prioritised together.
What I took from it
We ran the story mapping workshop without personas and it slowed us down badly in the early stages — we spent hours arguing about whose day we were mapping. I’ve never started one without them since.
I also learned that research is mostly logistics. Not confirming a participant the day before, not leaving enough gap between sessions — small process failures that cost real data.