UX Study Case: Solve Bad User Journey in Every Topic Page (kumparan’s platform — dedicated msite and app)

Topic Page was assumed to be a heavily used feature, a place users could land on and immediately find the news that mattered to them, whether "Latest" or "Most Popular." In practice, that wasn't happening.

User journey that kumparandotcom want is :

Flowing from that user journey above represent till topic detail page, but do not see all of content. All of content it means in topic detail page there are two contents that really interesting those are Terkini and Terpopuler. If user want to see popular news that user must do follow the step with click the tab menu popular which the position also to be trouble because it is not too visible, and this happened like this :

Testing the flow myself first: my working mental model was that a topic tab functioned like a news channel, I'd open the Technology topic expecting to land directly on technology news I actually wanted, most notably the popular ones. Instead, finding "most popular" news inside a given topic took an unreasonable number of steps, and the tab that switched between "Latest" and "Most Popular" was easy to miss entirely. What should have taken seconds was taking minutes, and that kind of friction is exactly what pushes users to bounce to a competing news platform instead of finishing their task.

Rather than redesigning on assumption alone, I ran a structured two-track research process,qualitative usability testing paired with quantitative analytics, before touching the UI.

Research goals:

• Improve the performance and usability of the Topic Page feature
• Validate whether the feature actually matched what both the business and users wanted
• Increase article/news engagement driven from this feature
• Keep users reading through to completion instead of bouncing early

Approach:

• Qualitative usability testing with a representative sample of users, to surface real pain points directly from behavior, not assumptions
• Cross-referencing those qualitative findings against quantitative analytics on actual feature usage, to size how many users were affected
• Defining user personas from the combined data, used as the throughline connecting business goals, user needs, and the eventual UX/UI decisions
• Redesigning with three explicit objectives: remove the flow steps that confused users, guide reading with a cleaner minimal UI, and borrow interaction patterns users already relied on from competing platforms

The output was a new wireframe, a high-fidelity UI, and a working prototype, validated against the same user flow the research was built around, then shipped to production.

I conducted usability testing directly with readers of the platform, giving each participant a specific task and observing how they actually navigated to "most popular news" within a topic, rather than asking them to describe their behavior in the abstract.

Two participant groups were tested: existing users already searching for popular news within specific topics, and new users opening the platform for the first time with that same goal.

Across the five participants tested, spanning a lecturer, a content writer, a sports reporter, a lifestyle reporter, and a parenting reporter, ranging from casual to heavy daily news readers, a consistent set of pain points emerged:

• A confusing layout made it unclear where to even start looking for popular news
• The most popular content wasn't visually prioritized, so it went unnoticed
• Navigation between "Latest" and "Most Popular" was unclear or easy to miss entirely
• Some topic categories users cared about (e.g. parenting) weren't well represented
• The overall density of content on screen created cognitive overload rather than clarity

To size the problem beyond five interviews, I pulled two months of navigation analytics on the Topic Page feature in partnership with the Business Intelligence team.

• Logged-in users visiting the Topic Page: 14,798
• Non-logged-in users visiting the Topic Page: 450,396

The volume alone confirmed Topic Page was a genuinely high-traffic surface, which made the usability gap found in testing a meaningful, high-leverage problem to fix rather than an edge case.

Synthesizing both research tracks pointed to a clear, connected set of problems and a matching direction for the redesign.

Core pain points:

• Users didn't know where to start to complete their task
• Users struggled to identify what was actually worth reading
• Very few users reached their goal without friction
• The Topic Page read like a generic news channel rather than a curated destination, with gaps like missing parenting content
• The split between "Latest" and "Most Popular" wasn't discoverable

Redesign direction:

• Remove the flow steps that were actively confusing users
• Guide reading through a cleaner, more minimal interface rather than a dense one
• Make the "most popular" content immediately visible instead of buried behind an easy-to-miss tab
• Borrow interaction patterns users already understood from competing news platforms, lowering the learning curve

Working with the team, I translated the research findings into a new wireframe built around the corrected user flow, then iterated it into a high-fidelity UI and an interactive prototype, testing the redesigned flow against the same "find popular news in a topic" task the original research was built on.

The redesigned Topic Page shipped to production across both kumparan's dedicated mobile site and app, replacing the flow that had originally driven this research.