NBC News Digital
Designing a Scalable Audience Engagement System
MY ROLE
Product Design Intern
Design Systems, UI/UX, Cross-platform Experiences
OVERVIEW
NBC News uses promotional overlays to connect audiences with live conversations, events, and subscription offerings. But campaigns have different content needs, and experiences must work across desktop, mobile web, and in-app environments. The challenge was to create a flexible system that could support different campaigns without requiring a new design every time.
The goal was to make campaign creation more consistent, adaptable, and easier for the NBC News DTC team to manage independently. .
TEAM
NBC News Digital Product Design × DTC Engagement & Retention
TIMELINE
Summer Internship
June - Aug 2026
Product Design | Design Systems | Web & Mobile
My Role
For readers, overlays needed to communicate value quickly without overwhelming the content they came to read.
For the internal team, templates needed to be easy to customize without compromising design quality.
Three principles guided my work:
Clarity over complexity. Make the message and next action immediately understandable.
Flexibility without inconsistency. Accommodate different content types while maintaining a recognizable visual language.
Design for implementation. Consider real platform capabilities, responsive behavior, and editable content—not just how the designs looked in Figma.
Designing for two audiences: the NBC News readers and the DTC Team: people building campaigns
I owned the design exploration and development of a reusable Figma template system, working with the DTC Engagement & Retention team to understand campaign requirements and platform constraints.
The Template Designs
Impact
What I Learned
9.17M impressions · ~0.50% CTR
Reusable designs spanning desktop web, mobile web, and in-app experiences.
Designing a system means designing for the people who will use it next.
This project shifted how I think about product design.
I learned to consider not only the person interacting with an interface, but also the teams responsible for building, updating, and maintaining it.
The most valuable design isn't always a new screen. Sometimes it's a system that makes every screen after it easier to create.
3 campaign types
3 delivery formats
The project supported an established NBC News Digital engagement and subscriber acquisition channel.
Beyond these channel metrics, the primary contribution was operational: a reusable design foundation and documented handoff for future campaigns.
The reported engagement metrics are channel benchmarks, not a measured performance lift attributable to my redesigned templates
A unified foundation for subscription, Live Q&A, and promotional experiences.
Historical Digioh campaign performance, providing context for the scale of the channel the templates were designed to support.