Situation
The Los Angeles Times needed an early functional testing prototype for a news app. I was the UX team member solely responsible for building it.
Constraint
The company’s proprietary CMS already had taxonomy. The app had to follow stories the way the newsroom already classified them, not invent a parallel model.
Decision
The architecture centered on a “topics” concept: following news based on taxonomy terms in the CMS, so prototype behavior matched editorial structure.
Outcome
A testable prototype the team could use before a full native build, with topics as the follow mechanic.
What I would do again
Prototype against the real taxonomy. News apps fail when “topics” are a designer’s labels instead of the CMS’s.
What I would change
I would have written the topics object (subscribe, unfollow, related stories) as a spec the newsroom could argue with, not only a clickable prototype.