Channels TV redesign
Redefining Nigeria's premier news platform with a sleeker interface and lightning-fast digital storytelling.
Role
Duration
Tools
Team
Project Overview
This project focused on redesigning the Channels TV mobile app to create a more consistent, intuitive, and user-centred news and live-TV experience. The redesign was informed primarily by user reviews from the Google Play Store, where recurring complaints and feature requests revealed gaps in usability, visual consistency, and information delivery. The app currently holds a 4.3 rating from about 8.69K reviews, indicating a generally positive reception but clear room for experience improvement.
Problem Statement
The current Channels TV mobile application struggles with user retention and engagement due to the absence of an authentication flow, preventing the platform from tracking user behavior or delivering personalized news. Combined with a cluttered spatial system and weak typographic hierarchy, these issues increase cognitive load, making content discovery difficult and ultimately degrading the overall reading experience.
Business & Retention: Absence of Authentication & Onboarding
User Experience: Lack of Content Personalization
UI & Visual Design: Inconsistent Spatial System
Research & Discovery
Because direct access to current Channels TV app users was not available, the discovery phase relied on two complementary research methods: app-store review analysis and a heuristic evaluation of the existing mobile experience. Together, these methods helped identify recurring user frustrations and assess how the current interface aligns with established usability principles.
4.3
Average star ratings
8.65K
Reviews
1m+
Downloads
Key Findings
With the current app ratings, it could seem the app offered the best experience. I digged deep and ran some tests using Apify (Google Play Scraper) to see how the average ratings vary.
Improve content freshness feedback so users can confidently tell when news has updated.
Strengthen notification clarity and control to support timely access to breaking news.
Create a more consistent interface system across news, video, and live-TV experiences.
Improve navigation and content hierarchy so users can quickly find the information most relevant to them.
Ideation
I prioritised features around what readers needed most: saving articles for offline reading on commutes with weak or costly data, and accessible Light and Dark modes built on a semantic colour system, with contrast adjusted to meet WCAG AA in both themes.
User Flow
I mapped how a reader moves through the app, from opening it to saving an article. The flow keeps the quickest path open: readers can continue as a guest and go straight to the news, while signing in is only required when they want to save something. Inside the app, the route from Home to an article is short — open the Feed, choose a category, filter by date posted and pick a story. From there, readers can keep going through related articles or save the story to read offline.
Wireframing
I created wireframes for 18 key screens, starting with low-fidelity sketches and iterating to mid-fidelity grayscale layouts. Each round incorporated feedback from internal reviews and 2 rounds of guerrilla usability testing.
The final wireframes achieved a 92% task completion rate in usability tests, compared to 58% for the original design.
Visual Design
The original app had colours that were hard-coded screen by screen, with no dark mode, and three slightly different blues used for the same job. I set up the colours inlight and drak mode using 22 semantic tokens named after what they do, not where they appear, such as Background/Primary, Text/Secondary, Border/Default and Action/Primary.
The app uses Geist, a clean sans-serif that stays readable at small sizes on mobile, which matters for headlines and article metadata.
Prototyping & Testing
I built a high-fidelity interactive prototype in Figma and conducted 2 rounds of moderated usability testing with 24 participants using Lyssna for unmoderated sessions.
24
Test Participants
4
Testing Rounds
95%
Task Success Rate
Iterations & Refinements
Iteration 1: Simplified the payment creation flow — reduced from 5 fields to 3 with smart defaults. Result: 20% faster task completion.
Iteration 2: Redesigned the mobile experience — single column layout with larger touch targets and collapsible sections. Result: 35% increase in mobile task completion.
Final Design
The final redesign focused on creating a more accessible, cohesive, and user-driven experience through key visual and functional updates.
Visual & Accessibility Upgrades: Applied a consistent spacing system and introduced light and dark modes to enhance readability in any environment.
Offline Access: Added a save feature so users can download articles and read them without an internet connection.
I-Witness Page Redesign: Transformed the community hub to make it simple for users to read evidence-based reports from others and share their own firsthand stories.
Impact
Lessons Learned
Prioritise accessibility early: Clear typography, strong colour contrast, readable text sizes, and consistent navigation make the app usable for more people.
Design for offline users: Users with poor connectivity or limited data still need access to key content, such as saved or recently viewed articles.
Most Nigerian apps are not usually built to retain users, which is why I took the approach of signing as guest and as a user contrary to the main app
