Winning the battle for audience attention
Users have infinite content choices and shrinking patience. We design discovery systems and content hierarchies that surface the right story at the right moment.
Disrupting media
UI/UX design for news & media.
Building editorial platforms that increase readership, engagement and retention.
Change how your audience experiences your content, reading, listening and watching, with design that adapts to emerging technologies and shifting consumption habits. Streaming, broadcast, publishing and social platforms all share one truth: attention is earned, not given. We design the experiences that make audiences stay, return and subscribe.
What we solve
We shape strong digital experiences for news & media.
Modernising legacy broadcast infrastructure
Rebuilding digital experiences on top of ageing CMS and broadcast systems requires UX that hides operational complexity rather than inheriting it.
Converting casual visitors into paying subscribers
Subscription conversion depends on trust, perceived value and frictionless paywalls. We design the moments that turn anonymous readers into loyal members.
Personalising content at scale without losing editorial voice
Algorithmic personalisation can erode editorial identity. We design recommendation systems that serve the user without sacrificing the brand.
Where we work
Optimising every layer of news & media.
- Digital news & editorial platforms
- Video & audio streaming platforms
- Social & interactive entertainment
- Subscription & membership experiences
How we help
We don’t just design. We build for the sector.
Audience research
How real readers and viewers find, consume and abandon content, and what pulls them back, mapped before any layout is drawn.
Editorial product design
Article pages, homepages, topic hubs, players and newsletter flows designed to serve the story first.
Multi-platform design systems
One coherent visual language across web, app, smart TV, newsletter and social, built so the newsroom can publish at speed.
Subscriber & content strategy
Paywall placement, onboarding and retention design that grow subscriber revenue without eroding the trust that brought readers in.
News and streaming in the Gulf and the Levant
The region’s audiences have moved to the phone faster than its publishers. Arabic-language streaming has grown into a crowded, competitive market, backed by Saudi Arabia’s investment in its own media and entertainment sector under Vision 2030 and by the UAE’s position as the regional base for broadcasters and digital publishers; Lebanon continues to supply much of the region’s editorial, creative and production talent.
Readers and viewers here are young, mobile-first and bilingual. They switch between Arabic and English within a session, expect regional drama and local news in the same app, and will leave a page or a player that takes a second too long to load on a mid-range Android phone.
For publishers the challenge is now commercial as much as editorial. Advertising alone no longer carries a newsroom, so subscriptions, memberships and streaming bundles have to be designed into the product, without putting a wall between the audience and the story that brought them in.
How we approach media products
We start with the moment that matters most: the first few seconds after someone arrives from a link, a notification or a smart TV home screen. Audience research shows us how real readers and viewers find, consume and abandon content; analytics show us where they drop off. The journeys with the biggest leak, the article page, the player, the paywall, the sign-up, are the ones we prototype and test first.
From there we build the system the newsroom publishes with: templates for article pages, homepages, topic hubs and players, a bilingual component library with clear rules for Arabic and English typography, and documented behaviours that map to your CMS and editorial workflow. Editors should find it as easy to use as the audience does.
What we’ve shipped
For Shasha we designed an Arabic-first OTT streaming experience across mobile, smart TV and web, built right-to-left from the first wireframe for audiences across the Middle East. Our streaming and editorial work also includes Thaqafiya, Al Araby+ VOD and the Alballam platform, video-on-demand and content platforms designed for Arabic-speaking audiences across web, mobile and TV.
Related work
News & Media products we’ve shaped.
Services for news & media
FAQ
Common questions about news & media UX.
How do you design for audience retention in media products?
Retention starts with reducing friction between the user and the content they care about. We design personalised content discovery flows, intuitive navigation hierarchies and engagement patterns, progress tracking, bookmarking and smart notifications, that keep audiences coming back. We also run behavioural analysis to identify where users drop off and iterate on those touchpoints specifically.
Do you have experience designing for OTT and streaming platforms?
Yes. We've worked on video-first and content-heavy platforms where the viewing experience, content browsing architecture and cross-device consistency are critical. Our work covers everything from onboarding flows and subscription UX to content carousels, player UI and watchlist management, always optimised for lean-back and lean-forward viewing contexts.
Can you work with our existing CMS or editorial workflow?
Absolutely. We design with your editorial team's reality in mind. Whether you're on WordPress, Arc Publishing, Contentful or a custom CMS, we map our UX decisions to your content model and publishing workflow, so the experience is as smooth for your editors as it is for your audience. We also document component behaviours to make handoff clean and adoption fast.
How long does a typical news and media UX project take?
It depends on scope. A focused engagement, say, redesigning a section or optimising a content flow, typically runs 4 to 8 weeks. A full platform UX overhaul, from discovery through design system and handoff, usually spans 3 to 6 months. We work in phased milestones so you see progress early and can validate direction before full build-out.
How do you measure success for a media project?
We tie success metrics to your business goals from day one. For media, that typically means tracking engagement depth (scroll, dwell time, pages per session), return visit rate, subscription conversion and content discoverability metrics. We establish a baseline before the project starts and measure against it post-launch, so impact is clear and documented, not assumed.
Do you design media products for Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Lebanon?
Yes. Much of our media work is for Arabic-first publishers and streaming services whose audiences span the Gulf and the Levant, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, where news and video are consumed overwhelmingly on phones and increasingly on smart TVs, and Lebanon, which remains one of the region's editorial and creative hubs. We design for audiences who move between Arabic and English in the same session, expect regional and local content side by side, and judge a platform by how fast the player starts on a mid-range phone.
Can you design Arabic-first editorial and streaming experiences?
Arabic and right-to-left layout is a foundation of how we work, not a translation step at the end. Mirrored navigation, Arabic typography at headline and body sizes, bidirectional captions and metadata, mixed-script search and remote-control navigation on smart TVs are designed and tested in Arabic from the first wireframe, then adapted to English.
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