User Comment Integration

Your comments, wherever you read.

WELT's comment section existed on the web — but not in the app. Readers who engaged with articles, responded to other users, or built up a comment history had no way to access or manage that activity on mobile. The brief: bring the full comment experience natively into the WELT News App, without simply porting the web interface across.

The starting point was the user profile. The first viewport shows the ten most recent comments a user has written — enough context to feel personal, light enough not to overwhelm. From there, a single tap on "Mehr" opens the full comment history. In the expanded view, users can sort their comments three ways: by most likes, most replies, or most recent. Replies to their own comments are surfaced inline — so a conversation doesn't require hunting across articles to follow.

A persistent bottom bar gives access to unpublished comments — those still awaiting moderation. Here, users get full transparency into the status of each submission: comments flagged in red have been rejected, with a visible reason attached; those highlighted in yellow are still under review. It's a deliberate design choice to surface this information rather than leave users wondering why a comment never appeared.

The design challenge was less about adding features and more about making existing behaviour feel native. Web patterns that work with a mouse and a wide viewport don't always translate to a thumb and a small screen. Every interaction was reconsidered from the ground up — tested with real users and iterated based on what we observed, not what we assumed. Throughout, I worked closely with development to ensure the concept was buildable, the handoff was tight, and the implementation matched the intent.