Yahoo Trending is a standalone Yahoo News experience surfacing the top 100 trending stories, videos, and conversations across the internet in near real time. As the lead and sole product designer, I shaped the end-to-end experience.
Role
Senior Product Designer
Timeline
IN HOUSE
Color Of Change
Focus
2025-2026
Design Strategy / Real-Time Data Pipelines / AI-Assisted Iterations and Prototyping / Interaction Design / Editorial Discovery
Yahoo Trending was designed as a new editorial discovery destination within Yahoo News, surfacing the most talked-about stories across the internet through AI-powered data pipelines and editorial curation.
The experience needed to balance speed, clarity, and scalability while helping users quickly navigate rapidly evolving conversations, media, and news signals.
Building a 0→1 Editorial Platform
As a 0→1 initiative, the product evolved rapidly alongside changing editorial goals, data availability, and technical constraints. Because trend data was generated and refined in near real time, the design process required close collaboration across product, engineering, editorial, and leadership teams to continuously shape what the experience could become.
The challenge extended beyond interface design. The product needed to feel dynamic and distinct while still integrating naturally within Yahoo’s broader ecosystem of design systems, content structures, and engineering patterns.
Agentic Workflows
AI-assisted workflows played a significant role throughout the project, accelerating rapid prototyping, interaction exploration, and iterative experimentation. I used tools including Claude, Cursor, and Terminal to prototype, quickly test concepts, refine interaction behaviors, synthesize research insights, explore multiple product directions in parallel, and push design updates to GitHub.
These workflows allowed the team to move more fluidly through ambiguity while increasing the speed and breadth of design exploration.
Impact
Yahoo Trending increased engagement across Yahoo News experiences while improving discoverability for articles, videos, and editorial content. More broadly, the project established scalable patterns for future real-time editorial experiences and demonstrated how AI-assisted systems could support dynamic content discovery at scale.
