BTN News Aggregator Design
Year:
2026
Category:
Interaction Design
Visual Design
Can a news product create a different relationship with attention?**
The obvious problem with building a news product is finding and presenting enough information.
The more interesting problem is deciding what kind of relationship the product should create between a reader and that information.
I worked on BTN's interface and product experience with that question in mind: how does the product encourage discovery without reproducing the engagement logic of the platforms it was trying to offer an alternative to?
The work examined the flows, hierarchy and behavioural assumptions embedded in the experience, translating those observations into changes to the product.
the analysis
UK independent media has a distribution problem that isn't really about reach. The aggregators that exist either flatten everything into one algorithmic feed or just replicate the platform logic publishers are trying to get away from.
The dominant UI grammar — infinite scroll, intermittent reward, optimised session length — is structurally hostile to the kind of slow, loyal readership independent media needs to survive. You can't fix that with better content recommendations.
The interface itself has to ask something different of the reader.
the design
What this demonstrates isn't specific to Bulletin. There's a whole category of media infrastructure — public interest, independent, subscription-based — where the interface is working against the product's actual values.
The design language here is replicable as a strategic position: subculture as control system, layout as behaviour constraint. The opportunity is for organisations that already know they don't want to be addictive but haven't figured out how to make that structurally legible in the product rather than just stated in the about page.
