Live Radio UX

This project took place 2021-2022. Since 2019, I've worked at iHeartMedia as a Senior UX Researcher leading research efforts for internal applications. One suite of applications is for sales professionals. The other is for talent (DJs) in the studio. This project centers on building software for talent to use live on the air in their studios from the ground up. The previous software they had used was designed and implemented in the 1980's and had only received minor incremental updates since then. This project aimed to make it a modern, cloud-native web app. This project was so massive that fully encapsulating it here in this case study will be impossible - so feel free to ask me questions about individual pieces.

A few months into this project, I was made the Interim Director of UX at iHeartMedia, which meant that not only was I doing the UX research for the project, I was also managing all UX efforts on it, including two designers and an intern.

We started the project with several important research questions developed from UX and business stakeholders:

1. How do talent use the current software to do their jobs?
2. What do talent need or want that they don't get now from the current software?
3. In what ways can a cloud app and AI remove burdens from talent?
4. What processes do talent perform now that we can rethink and streamline?

In order to answer these questions, I started with a series of interviews with talent.

Initial Interviews

I started work on this project by talking with and learning from the business analyst that had been working on the project for the past year and had developed relationships with business stakeholders. I then read as much documentation as I could on the application. Note that each of the following documents are quite a bit longer than the screenshot can show.

Design Sprint

The next step was to run a design sprint, which was first pioneered at Google. The lead designer on the projet, Tanya, put this sprint together and ran it. I participated, watched, took notes, and sythesized data from each day of the sprint to better aid our process.

Rapid Prototype

After the design sprint, we felt like we had a good handle on user needs, user workflows, and a direction for design. So, we went to work for a week on designing a rapid prototype.

First Iteration in Axure

Ethnography - Station Visits

As we tried to wrap our heads around what went wrong and why the users didn't like our prototype at all, I started to realize that we hadn't done any ethnographic work. The COVID-19 pandemic made it very difficult to travel and visit stations, but right around this time everything started to open back up. So, I went with a senior designer to studios in Houston and San Antonio, TX to observe morning shows.

Watching our users work live on the air was eye-opening. We quickly realized that there was just too much "in the water" that our users couldn't articulate when asked. There were tons of little things they did every day we had never heard them talk about. We were also amazed at just how much they fly by the seat of their pants! A radio show is truly done "in the moment" with extremely thin margin for error. This is why our interviews failed us in producing a prototype.

We also realized we had been only solving for half the problem. Talent utilize software AND hardware to playout their shows. We thought we would provide them everything they needed through the software, but we realized we had to design for a digital interface that utilized a physical sound board. Below you can see the software we had to redesign/modernize and the physical board below it. There's a lot more to the board, which you can see more of in the video below.

I've put a little video here below so you can see what it was like to observe in the studio.

Brand New Mocks

Armed with our new insights from ethnographic observation, we went back to the drawing board. We decided to keep them as wireframes until we had settled on a design that would actually meet the needs of our users and reflect the reality of a digital/physical hybrid interface.

Medium Fidelity

Hi-Fi Mocks

With designs finalized, we started building out screens for full prototype usability testing.

Usability Testing

I led all of the usability testing efforts (while also managing the UX team and all of our design efforts across the ecosystem). I decided to begin rapid weekly testing on each of the major modules in the system. By the time we started usability testing, development had already started building the backend and working on the front-end components. With that in mind, I prioritized which modules to test based on development priorities so that we could deliver insights about the usability of our product in an agile way.

We started our usability testing with the phones system because that had the most impending deadline for development. We tested with five users - some of the top talent on the radio in the United States! It was really exciting to meet some of these legends and watch them work through our phones prototypes. Overall, we got excellent feedback and some really interesting insights into their work and why some of our ideas needed to change to better fit it.

Because this project is so huge, it would be impossible to share all of the insights from all of the different pieces of the app. So, I'll just share what we learned from the phones usability testing. We learned:

• The text on the card was too small.
• The two green buttons to pick up the call were really confusing.
• The buttons were too close together and might lead to unintentional misclicks. Accidentally hanging up on a guest on-air could be disastrous for a show.
• No one noticed the star rating system until we pointed it out.

So, we iterated on our designs a few times and finally landed on this below:

We did this for each and every module in the live system. After months of work and re-work, we finally launched the product!

We did a lot of user observation after launch with the first live shows and studios that were selected for the MVP release. We used screen recording and YouTube broadcasting to see both what was happening in the UI as well as in the studio and what the talent was doing with the board. Here's a shot of the second live show we did:

Want me to do this for your company?

email me: jrp09a@acu.edu