NOS redesign
End-to-end UX and product design for the NOS digital redesign.
Product concept · UX · 2019 – 2022
Assignment
NOS is the largest news brand in the Netherlands. Its website and app together reach more daily users than any other Dutch news platform. By 2019, three quarters of all daily traffic already came from smartphones, and the NOS app was growing year on year in an increasingly competitive market. Radio and television reach had been declining, making the digital product more important than ever as the primary touchpoint for millions of people. The existing platform needed to evolve, not just visually, but structurally, to keep pace with audience expectations and stay ahead of competitors.
Process
Results
The goal was to refresh the NOS experience across all platforms (iOS, Android, and web) from the ground up. This meant designing a flexible grid system capable of accommodating a wide range of content types, including richer video formats, while also introducing a local news dimension to better serve regional audiences. Beyond the structural redesign, the brief called for conceiving unique features to deepen engagement: a sports agenda with livestream notifications, new short vertical video formats, an expanded football scoreboard, and improved tablet layouts. All of this needed to be underpinned by a comprehensive component library to bring consistency and scalability to every content type across every platform.
Together with digital designer Dionne van Dijk, I was responsible for the full design process, from concept and strategy through UX, visual design, prototyping, and presentations, all the way to the component library and post-launch feature development. At times this also included managing the product backlog. We covered everything from kick-off to launch and beyond, working in close collaboration with three large development teams.
The project followed an iterative design process, beginning with an extensive user research phase in late 2019. Personas helped ground decisions in real user needs, and sketching sessions allowed us to explore directions quickly. Early concepts were brought to stakeholders for review, keeping editorial and strategic perspectives in the loop from the start. Usability testing conducted with Lookback on early-stage designs provided direct insight into how people interacted with the interface. Findings fed directly into feature refinement in close collaboration with developers. The component library grew steadily alongside the product, becoming a living system.
Development kicked off in early 2020, culminating in the public launch in April 2021, after which I stayed involved through 2022 to continue iterating and expanding the system. The flexible design framework remains in use to this day, a testament to the scalability of the system we built. What started as a refresh became a foundation that the NOS product and editorial teams could continue to build on.
Launch
April 2021
Unique visitors per day
4 million
Credits
This project was a team effort. I worked closely with Dionne van Dijk (digital designer) and collaborated across three large development teams who brought the designs to life.
Tools used:
Sketch
Miro
Lookback
Jira