Overview

Sky News Australia’s online audience surged in 2022, catapulting the network to Australia’s most engaging digital news brand.

• An average 30 million unique monthly viewers watch Sky News Australia’s YouTube channel, including 6.6 million Australians, making it Australia’s highest-reaching news brand.
• In 2021, SkyNews.com.au was overhauled and is now one of Australia’s leading news websites with more than 5.2 million monthly unique visitors worldwide accessing the site, an increase of 125% year-on-year.

I led the product design of the new mobile and tablet apps across iOS and Android.

This was also the first project built using the App Design System.

Challenge

The previous version of the Sky News app was last updated on October 2020.

Looking at the old app, there were some shortcomings for a news app:

• The only form of content were videos
• A total of 12 stories were available on the homepage
• Podcasts would link the user to the podcast page in a web browser

News homepage

A good news homepage should provide a wide breadth of content and be interesting to use. Ideally, the user would want to continue scrolling to read or watch the next piece of content.

Compared to the old homepage of 12 videos, the new one contains:

• Top stories (including Breaking News)
• Sky News Livestream (directs users to a paid Flash subscription)
• Video carousels
• Insights & Analysis (our most engaging content)
• Australian, World, Business and Lifestyle news sections

Watch videos

Similar to the homepage, the Watch tab was completely redesigned.

As videos made up the majority of content on Sky News, this was key drawcard for a majority of our users. An improved layout increased discovery of content while also providing easier access to the latest news.

Note that the old app would just redirect users to the Sky News website.

Read articles

With the 2021 redesign of the SkyNews.com.au website, an increased focus was placed on written content.

We built out support for full length articles and live blogs. This was important because opinion pieces were key catalysts for discussions from users.

Listen to Podcasts

The previous app only directed users to the website’s podcast page.

We built a fully-fledged native podcast player, which utilised the extensive library of audio content produced for Sky News.

A key feature was being able to listen to podcasts in the background while reading through articles or opening other apps.

Results

6 weeks after the initial release of the new app across all platforms, there were a few key metrics that stood out:

Looking ahead

The Sky News Australia app now has a solid foundation and further features can be built out, following through from user feedback.

Reusable components from other apps built on the App Design System can also be migrated into Sky News.

In the meantime, here are some more screenshots from the app: