Overview

The Challenge

How I Built It

Stakeholders

Reflection

Back

REC Power

2026

Greentech Media's first native app

Web Design

Climate Tech

Campaign

Design Lead

Web Design

Campaign

Climate Tech

Design Lead

Greentech Media had a strong desktop readership and a mobile experience that did not match it. I'd been at Greentech Media since building their original brand system, and by 2016 I was Creative Director. I led creative direction on the first native app we ever built, and owned the navigation decision that shaped the whole product.

Impact

Shipped to the App Store. Live roughly two years. Sunset by a corporate integration, not by performance.

team

Creative Direction: Kristine LaRocca

UI Design: Kristine LaRocca and
Binh Nguyen

Prototyping: Binh Nguyen

Development: Happy Cog

skills

Creative direction

Design strategy

Information architecture

Native App UI

Stakeholder Buy-in

Developer Handoff

The Challenge

Greentechmedia.com reached a wide audience. Mobile engagement did not keep up.

Our readers were energy professionals. They checked news between meetings, at conferences, on job sites, and in places with unreliable connection. The mobile site treated all of them the same way and asked them to be online to read anything.

The bigger challenge came before any design work. Nobody had decided the app was worth building. A native app was a real investment for a publication our size, and the question of whether to fund it was open.

How I built it

Move 1. I came in to make the argument visible

Our head of marketing formed a task team to work out whether a native app earned its cost. Editorial, product, and marketing all had a stake and all had different reasons to care.

By the time I joined, the decision to explore was made. What they needed was someone to turn the argument into something people could look at. An app that doesn't exist yet is easy to disagree about, because everyone is picturing something different.

So I got the case out of conversation and onto screens. The features under discussion became a thing stakeholders could see and react to rather than imagine.

The argument for native came down to three things the web could not do. Offline reading, which mobile web could not do at all. Push, which mattered in a market where policy and project news breaks fast. And real performance, which native gave us for free.

Everything else on the wishlist could technically live on the web. Personalization and in-app purchase were better native, but better is not the same as impossible, and only the impossible things justified the cost.

Marketing carried the strongest argument, which was our user base. Our readers were a defined professional audience, not general news traffic. That made personalization worth building rather than a nice idea.

Move 2. I kept the links most designers would have cut

This was the decision I spent the most time on and the one I'd defend hardest.

Clean energy is not one subject. Solar, grid, storage, and policy have almost no reader overlap. A solar analyst and a policy person open the same app for completely different reasons and neither wants to wade through the other's coverage. Our readers did not browse. They sorted.

That meant surfacing sectors directly in the navigation, which pushed the link count well past what a mobile app usually carries. Most designers would look at that and call it too many. Applying the standard simplification rule would have buried the exact thing our audience came for.

So I looked at the NYTimes mobile app and leaned on it heavily. They handle enormous link density and high traffic and they had already solved the structural problem I had. I took their model for organizing a lot of sections without the interface collapsing, and adapted it to our sectors.

We went back and forth on nav items for a long time. There was a lot to fit and no version was obviously right. Mimicking a publication that had already solved it at scale beat inventing our own answer.

This was not an argument for keeping everything. We simplified wherever simplifying did not cost a reader their sector. The density was deliberate and limited to the places it earned its keep.

A generalist would have cut the sector links to clean up the nav. In clean energy, the sector is the reason someone opens the app.

Move 3. Prototype, test, hand off

Binh Nguyen and I designed the UI in Sketch. He handled prototyping in InVision, which gave us something stakeholders could walk through rather than a deck describing an app.

We mapped journeys for three audiences: paid subscribers, free readers, and event attendees. Each arrived for a different reason and each needed a different first screen.

We ran pre-launch user testing to validate the interface and the journeys before committing to build. Handoff went through Zeplin with native specs to Happy Cog, who developed the app. They sent beta builds over as they went, so we reviewed real screens on real devices instead of waiting for a finished handover.

Personalized feed. Content by user interest: solar, grid, policy.

Push notifications. Real-time alerts and recommendations.

Offline access. Download and read without Wi-Fi.

Podcast integration. Stream industry news directly in-app.

Smarter navigation. Faster access to trending and saved articles.

Event discovery. Browse location-based energy events.

In-app sharing. Send articles to colleagues with one tap.

Automatic updates. Website integration keeps content current without editors publishing twice.

Working with stakeholders

Funding the app was a push. It was not a project anyone was waiting to approve.

What moved it was our head of marketing, who took the case forward and secured approval. The prototype did not do the convincing. What it did was show behavior. People could see how the app would actually work instead of arguing about a description of it, and that took a category of vagueness out of the conversation.

The app also earned support because it did more than deliver news. Readers could get to event information, and offline article downloads turned out to be one of the features people liked most. That range made it easier to defend as a product rather than a second version of the website.

The Outcome

The app shipped to the Apple App Store in 2019 and ran for roughly two years.

It gave energy professionals something the mobile site never had: sector-level content they chose, articles that worked without a connection, event access, podcasts, and one-tap sharing with colleagues.

Wood Mackenzie had acquired Greentech Media in 2016, but we kept operating as ourselves. Our own brand, our own newsroom, our own product decisions. The app was built and launched inside that independence.

That ended in 2021. Wood Mackenzie fully integrated Greentech Media, stopped publishing to the site in mid-March, and the app was retired along with the publication.

It ended because of a corporate integration, not because of how it performed.

Reflection

I'm proudest of the navigation call, because it was the decision where domain knowledge beat design convention. Years in clean energy told me our readers sorted by sector. A designer without that background would have simplified the nav, shipped something cleaner, and made it worse.

What I'd do differently: I'd document the sector navigation logic as a standalone piece of reasoning at the time, not just as a design output. When the publication was folded, the thinking went with the product. A written argument for why that structure worked would have outlived the app.

Building something that ships and then gets sunset by an acquisition is a specific kind of experience. The work was still right. The company it belonged to stopped existing. Those are separate facts and I've stopped conflating them.

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