Founded in 1988 with the support of 27,000 individual shareholders, Hankyoreh is a renowned legacy newspaper in Korea representing the left wing. The Hankyoreh app was released in 2013 and received a lot of favorablereviews. But after 10 years, it faced various issues and design and features were out-dated.

Functionally, the article took a long time to load and there were no basic functions such as sharing/scraping. It didn’t support personalization showing the same articles to all users regardless of their interest. The number of signed-in users stagnated because there was no function to promote membership.

In terms of user experience, the app provided the same experience as the mobile website. Thus the reading experience was not optimized for the app, the search feature was hidden, and it was inconvenient to navigate.

As a result, in the last three years, monthly active users have decreased by 20%, and new users have decreased by more than 10%. These problems posed a major threat to Hankyoreh's continued growth and required mobile-focused strategy and redesign to retain users.

In order to improve user interface (UI) design, user experience (UX) and introduce an app that can be differentiated from the mobile web, Hankyoreh partnered with Google on a project to revamp their app.

First, Hankyoreh looked at the old version of the app closely to find problems from a user’s point of view, benchmarked major competitors and global apps to identify the latest trends. To increase usability, recommended keywords were provided on frequently visited search pages. In order to boost sign-up and sign-in, a keyword follow function was added. A new function bar was added at the bottom of the app to make it easier to navigate within the app. By creating a feed menu where users can collect and view the articles users followed, Hankyoreh met the needs of readers who wanted personalized content experience. An improved reading experience including various features such as dark mode, highlights, and memo was implemented.

As a result of these efforts, the total number of users who installed the app has doubled and monthly active users have increased by 208%. The number of followers for reporters increased by 282%, and the average daily number of new sign-ups has increased by 167%.