Icon News

The problem

The news never ends, and much of it is heavy. But now and then, one story is worth opening.

Information overload costs more than time, it weighs on the mind. I get my news from social media and rarely open a news app, almost only to verify something. Only a story or two a day truly matters to me or catches my curiosity. Icon News tests two things: can one keyword and one emoji lighten that load, and can they work as a hook that makes me want to open the story?

Both let readers shape their feeds, but the list still never ends. I wanted to subtract: not a better-tuned feed, just one story.

How might we show relevance at a glance?

My principle was subtraction: from a feed to one story, then from a headline to a cue. A widget fits, because the story reaches the reader before they open anything. It only gets a glance, so I cut the headline until only the cue was left. What I leave out is also the hook: enough to feel relevant, little enough to stay curious.

The last step is a stamp. A widget is a small window on the home screen, so it should look good, and a stamp does. It also invites collecting, almost by instinct. The story card behind it is a postcard. With so little room, every word has to earn its place, which slows you down a little too.

What can be a visual cue?

I first tried AI-generated illustrations. They were expressive, but the same keyword could become very different pictures, and some were wrong or overly dramatic. For a product meant to lighten the load, drama points the wrong way, and a cue that needs interpreting is no longer a cue.

Emoji are less original, but their meaning is already shared and they cover most topics. That is what makes a glance work. They also read as fairly neutral, which suits heavy stories. So I paired one with the keyword and let the headline fall away. The full story is one tap behind it.

Icon News: Personalised for you

This fixed-scenario preview is for an international student living in East London and currently job-hunting.

Get your own Icon News

Tell it a little about yourself, and it picks one story from today's BBC headlines. The AI only chooses, writes the keyword and picks the emoji. The headline stays as the BBC wrote it.

Living with it

I kept it on my home screen from 28 July to 7 August. The widget turns one story into a stamp. Tapping it opens a short story card, and the full story is one more tap away.

These are the stamps I captured, not all of them. A few times my test API key failed and the widget fell back to a default newspaper image.

What I learnt

It worked as a hook. With the stamp on my home screen, I'd sometimes tap through to BBC out of plain curiosity.

Repetition reassured me. The heatwave appeared twice and I first took it for a bug. Then I realised it was a topic the news had stayed on for days, so it kept coming. I also saw that headlines change less often than I assumed, and my fear of missing out eased.

The story card is a trade-off. I opened about four cards a week, and almost always went on to the original. The card reveals information step by step so it never overwhelms, but it may also satisfy curiosity too early. My two goals pull against each other here, a lighter load and a stronger hook. I don't have an answer yet.

What to validate next

So far only I have used this prototype, so it is an exploration, not evidence that it lightens the load or improves news engagement. Next, I need to test whether others understand the cue quickly, feel lighter after reading, trust why a story is relevant to them, see the story card as a help or a hurdle, and find an emoji appropriate for serious events, which my own settings steered me away from.

The preview uses sample headlines for a fixed scenario. In the live prototype, headlines and links come from BBC News RSS; the keyword, icon, and match explanation are AI-generated.