CASE STUDY

People Magazine App: #1 in the App Store for magazines and publishing on launch day.

Opportunity

People’s readers were spending their celebrity-news time on TikTok and Instagram. Our CEO charged a team of five with creating an app in 12 weeks that could win that attention back for 98 million readers, with editors still deciding what gets published.

Role

I led UX and user research on the five-person team. I shaped the product concept, ran the research, and built the early prototypes.

Solution

The idea was the rabbit hole: personalized story pathways, where AI proposes the next story and writers and editors control what gets published. We worked by prototyping to learn. I used NotebookLM, ChatGPT and Perplexity to synthesize the research and iterate on prototypes faster.

Impact

#1 in the App Store for magazines and publishing on launch day

The concept work led the company to grow the team to 80 for the build and launch. Our CEO called it a moonshot.