Building a New Content-Discovery Feature for kumparan's Product Ecosystem

Collection" was proposed as a new feature across kumparan's platforms — mobile site, app, and desktop — with a supporting mechanism built into kumparan's internal CMS, Magnetic. The feature needed to let editors package curated content (special coverage, story series, themed collections) in a way the existing topic and timeline structures couldn't support, and needed to be designed as a system that worked on both the content-management side and the reader-facing side. I led this from initial mapping through to a validated, testable prototype, starting with mobile site as the first platform.

kumparan had recurring content that deserved to be packaged and surfaced together — special coverage, story series, and other curated collections — but the existing structure offered no dedicated way to do this. Valuable content risked getting lost in the regular timeline instead of building a cohesive reading experience, weakening both engagement and content literacy for the topics that mattered most.

I followed a structured five-stage process end to end:

1. Mapping — scoping what "collection" could realistically cover (special coverage, story series, and future collection types), and defining how the feature would connect between Magnetic (CMS) and the front-end.
2. Sketching — low-fidelity wireframes for both the Magnetic (CMS) side and the front-end UI, establishing content placement and information architecture before visual design.
3. Deciding — evaluating multiple UI directions with the team (including several card-layout variations for the collection home) and converging on an approved direction for both the front-end and the Magnetic CMS experience.
4. Prototyping — building interactive prototypes (InVision, plus live dev prototypes) covering both the Magnetic collection-management flow and the mobile site's collection experience.
5. Testing — validating the concept and the high-fidelity prototype directly with prospective users before moving toward wider rollout.

On the CMS side, the design let editors create a parent "collection title," with nested sub-collections underneath it, giving them flexible control over how stories were grouped and curated.