My news extension, iQiosk, shows every story as exactly one sentence. Not a paragraph, not a "brief" — one sentence, with a link to the source if you want more. That constraint turned out to be the whole product. Here's what designing around it taught me.
The problem with "summaries"
Most news apps summarise like a compressor: they squeeze an article and hand you a smaller article. You still have to read, decide, and context-switch — just slightly less. The real cost of news isn't the reading, it's the triage: hundreds of headlines competing for the same judgement call, "is this worth my time?"
So the design question wasn't "how short can a summary be?" It was "what's the least a person needs to triage a story?" The answer, most of the time: what happened, and why it matters. One sentence can carry both — if it's written for triage instead of compression.
Rules the one-sentence format forced
- Facts first, colour never. The sentence states what happened. No adjectives doing persuasion work, no cliffhangers. If the fact is boring, the sentence is boring, and that's useful information too.
- No images, on purpose. A thumbnail is an emotional argument for a click. Remove it and the sentence has to earn attention honestly.
- The link is part of the design. The sentence is a signpost, not a replacement. Every story links to the publisher, because the goal is a calmer front door to the news, not a walled garden.
- A fixed menu beats an infinite feed. Twelve topics, refreshed twice a day, stories kept to the last 24 hours. When the list ends, you're done. "Done" is a feature almost no news product offers.
The economics only work because it's constrained
Because the catalogue is fixed — the same topics for everyone on the free tier — summaries are generated once and cached, not per reader. That makes the AI cost per story predictable and tiny, which is what lets a bootstrapped solo project offer a genuinely free tier with no account and no ads.
The Pro tier exists for the people the fixed menu doesn't fit: you describe your feed in your own words ("AI regulation in the EU, no opinion pieces") and get a daily digest at your time, in your language. Same one-sentence discipline, your topics instead of mine.
What I'd do differently
I'd add the constraint earlier. The first version had two-sentence summaries and a "highlights" rail, and it was just another feed. Cutting to one sentence felt like removing value; it was actually removing the competition between stories, which is where the calm comes from.
If you're building anything that filters the world for people: pick the smallest unit that still lets someone decide, and defend it against every "just one more line" — including your own.
iQiosk is a free Chrome extension — a personalised news panel one click from your toolbar: qlarkstudio.com/iqiosk
Top comments (0)