Unified Fast Cards
Unified Fast Cards
Unified
Project Summary
Project Summary
About the project
UFC (Unified Fast Cards) is a reimagination of Glance’s fast card experience, integrating diverse content verticals News, Games, Videos, and Shop into a seamless, premium, and highly engaging user interface.
Multiple legacy content formats = inconsistent UX
Users confused by jumping layouts → drop in engagement
Outcome? A 1.5x content consumption, session depth, and engagement across verticals, while laying down a unified template infrastructure for all future content formats.
Problem Space
Challenge: Users were trapped in a siloed content experience. Lesser-known verticals like Games, Shop, and Videos suffered from poor visibility. Bottom tabs (SDK-based) weren’t visible in tab-less OEMs, severely affecting content discovery and monetization.
Who: Android users on Glance lockscreen from OEMs like Xiaomi, Realme, Samsung, Vivo, Moto and Oppo.
Why Now: With growing inventory across verticals and expanding revenue goals, there was a need to unify the card experience while driving deeper engagement without overhauling OEM SDKs.
80% of cards published were from News/Sports; Videos and Games cards largely unseen or ignored.
Benefits of a unified Fast Card:
Provides a consistent UI/UX for users across products.
Ensures a clear visual hierarchy for key elements heading, publisher, author, time published, reading duration, etc.
Enables standardized capabilities such as bookmarking, feedback, bot integration, content personalization (see more/less, follow topics, etc.).
From an ads perspective, it allows us to design more effective ad templates where ads and content coexist seamlessly.
Discovery & Research
Methods: User Content analysis, OEM-specific audits, internal benchmarking, analytics review
Younger Audiences Prefer Varied Tonality: Young people are interested in both serious and lighthearted content. While they consume serious topics like health and world news, they are equally drawn to clickbait topics in entertainment, travel, and beauty.
Older Audiences Lean Towards Serious Content: Older individuals tend to prefer more serious content, but there is also a significant segment attracted to clickbait topics, particularly in entertainment and travel.
Gender-Specific Interests: The legend shows color-coding by gender preferences, suggesting targeted content might be optimized for male, female, or both genders, depending on the topic.
My role & team
Role: Lead UX Designer (with co-designer Rakesh)
Ownership: Strategy, structure, templates, OEM interaction, Design systems, handoffs
Collaborators: Product Managers (multiple EUs), PMs and Designers from Games, News, Shop, Video; Engineering leads and QA
Cross-team Impact:
Worked across EUs to align on a common Fast Card standardisation
Defined UX foundations compatible with different content formats (news summary, video previews, game launches, product listings)
Mentored designers contributing to visual layers
Ideation & Exploration
Multi-card layout compositions, swipe gestures, ad blend variants
Trade-offs & balancing designed a system where content and monetization (ads) coexist without overwhelming users
Resolved format challenges in designing card shells that work for text, video, game, and commerce in a single scalable framework
Final Design
Card System Design:
Unified Fast Card template supports:
Article cards with summaries
Video cards with preview
Game cards with interactive launch mechanics
Shop cards with embedded product links
Unified Fast Cards
Unified Fast Cards
Additional Features:
Swiping up/down toggles tab bar
Content hierarchy rules: visible card, partial fade to next
Persistent dark mode sync
Dynamic visual & data ingestion based on FC source (SHP, PHP, Games, Roposo)
Impact & Result
Engagement up
Reduced bounce on first card
Visibilities across EUs
Unified design = reduced design maintenance effort
Unified Fast Cards
Unified
Project Summary
About the project
UFC (Unified Fast Cards) is a reimagination of Glance’s fast card experience, integrating diverse content verticals News, Games, Videos, and Shop into a seamless, premium, and highly engaging user interface.
Multiple legacy content formats = inconsistent UX
Users confused by jumping layouts → drop in engagement
Outcome
A 1.5x content consumption, session depth, and engagement across verticals, while laying down a unified template infrastructure for all future content formats.
Problem Space
Challenge: Users were trapped in a siloed content experience. Lesser-known verticals like Games, Shop, and Videos suffered from poor visibility. Bottom tabs (SDK-based) weren’t visible in tab-less OEMs, severely affecting content discovery and monetization.
Who: Android users on Glance lockscreen from OEMs like Xiaomi, Realme, Samsung, Vivo, Moto and Oppo.
Why Now: With growing inventory across verticals and expanding revenue goals, there was a need to unify the card experience while driving deeper engagement without overhauling OEM SDKs.
80% of cards published were from News/Sports; Videos and Games cards largely unseen or ignored.
Benefits of a unified Fast Card:
Provides a consistent UI/UX for users across products.
Ensures a clear visual hierarchy for key elements heading, publisher, author, time published, reading duration, etc.
Enables standardized capabilities such as bookmarking, feedback, bot integration, content personalization (see more/less, follow topics, etc.).
From an ads perspective, it allows us to design more effective ad templates where ads and content coexist seamlessly.
Discovery & Research
Methods: User Content analysis, OEM-specific audits, internal benchmarking, analytics review
Younger Audiences Prefer Varied Tonality: Young people are interested in both serious and lighthearted content. While they consume serious topics like health and world news, they are equally drawn to clickbait topics in entertainment, travel, and beauty.
Older Audiences Lean Towards Serious Content: Older individuals tend to prefer more serious content, but there is also a significant segment attracted to clickbait topics, particularly in entertainment and travel.
Gender-Specific Interests: The legend shows color-coding by gender preferences, suggesting targeted content might be optimized for male, female, or both genders, depending on the topic.
My role & team
Role: Lead UX Designer (with co-designer Rakesh)
Ownership: Strategy, structure, templates, OEM interaction, Design systems, handoffs
Collaborators: Product Managers (multiple EUs), PMs and Designers from Games, News, Shop, Video; Engineering leads and QA
Cross-team Impact:
Worked across EUs to align on a common Fast Card standardisation
Defined UX foundations compatible with different content formats (news summary, video previews, game launches, product listings)
Mentored designers contributing to visual layers
Ideation & Exploration
Multi-card layout compositions, swipe gestures, ad blend variants
Trade-offs & balancing designed a system where content and monetization (ads) coexist without overwhelming users
Resolved format challenges in designing card shells that work for text, video, game, and commerce in a single scalable framework
Final Design
Card System Design:
Unified Fast Card template supports:
Article cards with summaries
Video cards with preview
Game cards with interactive launch mechanics
Shop cards with embedded product links
Unified Fast Cards
Additional Features:
Swiping up/down toggles tab bar
Content hierarchy rules: visible card, partial fade to next
Persistent dark mode sync
Dynamic visual & data ingestion based on FC source (SHP, PHP, Games, Roposo)
Impact & Result
Engagement up
Reduced bounce on first card
Visibilities across EUs
Unified design = reduced design maintenance effort
Unified Fast Cards
Unified
Project Summary
About the project
UFC (Unified Fast Cards) is a reimagination of Glance’s fast card experience, integrating diverse content verticals News, Games, Videos, and Shop into a seamless, premium, and highly engaging user interface.
Multiple legacy content formats = inconsistent UX
Users confused by jumping layouts → drop in engagement
Outcome? A 1.5x content consumption, session depth, and engagement across verticals, while laying down a unified template infrastructure for all future content formats.
Problem Space
Challenge: Users were trapped in a siloed content experience. Lesser-known verticals like Games, Shop, and Videos suffered from poor visibility. Bottom tabs (SDK-based) weren’t visible in tab-less OEMs, severely affecting content discovery and monetization.
Who: Android users on Glance lockscreen from OEMs like Xiaomi, Realme, Samsung, Vivo, Moto and Oppo.
Why Now: With growing inventory across verticals and expanding revenue goals, there was a need to unify the card experience while driving deeper engagement without overhauling OEM SDKs.
80% of cards published were from News/Sports; Videos and Games cards largely unseen or ignored.
Benefits of a unified Fast Card:
Provides a consistent UI/UX for users across products.
Ensures a clear visual hierarchy for key elements heading, publisher, author, time published, reading duration, etc.
Enables standardized capabilities such as bookmarking, feedback, bot integration, content personalization (see more/less, follow topics, etc.).
From an ads perspective, it allows us to design more effective ad templates where ads and content coexist seamlessly.
Discovery & Research
Methods: User Content analysis, OEM-specific audits, internal benchmarking, analytics review
Younger Audiences Prefer Varied Tonality: Young people are interested in both serious and lighthearted content. While they consume serious topics like health and world news, they are equally drawn to clickbait topics in entertainment, travel, and beauty.
Older Audiences Lean Towards Serious Content: Older individuals tend to prefer more serious content, but there is also a significant segment attracted to clickbait topics, particularly in entertainment and travel.
Gender-Specific Interests: The legend shows color-coding by gender preferences, suggesting targeted content might be optimized for male, female, or both genders, depending on the topic.
My role & team
Role: Lead UX Designer (with co-designer Rakesh)
Ownership: Strategy, structure, templates, OEM interaction, Design systems, handoffs
Collaborators: Product Managers (multiple EUs), PMs and Designers from Games, News, Shop, Video; Engineering leads and QA
Cross-team Impact:
Worked across EUs to align on a common Fast Card standardisation
Defined UX foundations compatible with different content formats (news summary, video previews, game launches, product listings)
Mentored designers contributing to visual layers
Ideation & Exploration
Multi-card layout compositions, swipe gestures, ad blend variants
Trade-offs & balancing designed a system where content and monetization (ads) coexist without overwhelming users
Resolved format challenges in designing card shells that work for text, video, game, and commerce in a single scalable framework
Final Design
Card System Design:
Unified Fast Card template supports:
Article cards with summaries
Video cards with preview
Game cards with interactive launch mechanics
Shop cards with embedded product links
Unified Fast Cards
Additional Features:
Swiping up/down toggles tab bar
Content hierarchy rules: visible card, partial fade to next
Persistent dark mode sync
Dynamic visual & data ingestion based on FC source (SHP, PHP, Games, Roposo)
Impact & Result
Engagement up
Reduced bounce on first card
Visibilities across EUs
Unified design = reduced design maintenance effort