Short UX Case Study

Radio Station Front-end Redesign

RadioMv is a non-profit international Christian online radio station based in state of Washington. With more than a million listeners worldwide and 7.5 millions visits annually, this radio station grew from a garage based studio to worldwide broadcasting online in 5 languages. In 2015, they decided to redesign their website.

My Role

I managed the redesign project from the first briefing to the last post-launch analytics report. I did have 2 interns that were assisting part time on this project, along with a copywriter and 3 content translators. As outlined below, I redesigned the information architecture and migrated the updated content into a new CMS with new theme. I was the sole UX/UI designer for this project.

Discovery Phase

The project started by reviewing the current user and listener statistics, along with recently designed user personas, to determine the goals for the project.

Userbase Review

We pulled up Google analytics along with our customer database to determine who made up the bulk of our users. We also considered data from the letters and calls that were received within the year.

User Age Demographics as of 2015

Personas

Since the radio station is faith based, the listeners are diverse in age and experience with technology. The following are a baseline for radio station's user and listener personas.

Review Takeaways

After reviewing the data and talking with the team and the director, we realized that one of the main reasons why the radio station wanted to update the website was aesthetics and security. As the online orders were increasing in frequency, they wanted to ensure that the website was running on a trusted CMS platform with the right plugins in place. Of course there were other concerns such as inconsistent design, lack images, poorly setup forms.

As we expand into Germany and Mexico, we need to accommodate multilingual access to the website”

That would mean that all the content would have to be reproduced in all four languages: Russian, English, Spanish and German.

The following business and design goals were set based on what the user personas and leadership vision for the project.

Design

The first step was to review the content. Even though the majority of the content would remain the same, I wanted to take the opportunity to revise and update as much as possible. A separate spreadsheet was created to keep track of changes.

Information Architecture

Once it was clear which content stays, I put together a few sitemaps until the team settled on the one below. It distributed all the pages under their logical categories. A new section titled "Our Projects" was added.

The proposed sitemap was then duplicated in the next three languages and I assigned translators to work on the copy for each.

Wireframes

From the beginning we knew that the budget and scope of the project would require us to use a commercial WordPress theme for this project. The CMS of choice was WordPress. After the board selected a WordPress theme there was not much room for UI design. However, there were plenty of options for layout.

I designed quick, rough wireframes of where we should position certain elements. I did the same for all the six types of pages. Below is one such wireframe for the homepage.

Rough wireframe of the home page.

UX Success

Finally, the website was launched. The number of visitors continued to grow. Facebook polls and calls from our listeners provided plenty of feedback on the new design.

UI layout of RadioMv Home Page as of June 2015.

As a result of the redesign, the non-profit saw:

• Increased visits to the website
• Longer visit times
• More orders of free marketing material
• Less tech support calls regarding website

Click here to check out the radio station website. Please keep in mind some aspects of the design might have been altered or changed over the years.

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