I had the pleasure of acting as UX designer for the conception and launch of The Times & Sundays Times’ latest product, Times Radio. Having the opportunity to design a completely fresh intellectual property from such a prestigious brand such as The Times meant a great deal to me.

Problem

The Times & Sunday Times has an extremely loyal subscriber base that often spans generations. However, these customers often digest The Times & Sunday Times content in long form consumption sessions in dedicated periods of their day. Content is consumed purley through written media, however, research shows that the same users consume large amounts of audio content by their parties outside of the time they spend interacting with our brand.

Proposed solution

Provide a Times & Sunday Times audio solution in the form of talk radio to incentivise greater and more meaningful interactions with our subscriber base, whilst insentiving new audio listeners to convert into paid written content subscribers.

01 - Concept validation

I joined News UK, the parent company of The Times, in the very conceptual stages of Times Radio. Coming in as a junior I was quickly given the responsibility of building out both the website and native app as concepts and validating not only their usability, but the product value add itself.

After I had taken Times Radio through multiple conceptual phases and user testing sessions, although we were still experiencing some issues with integration into the existing product ecosystem, Times Radio was deemed by the business to have a good potential return on investment and so was road mapped for development. Ongoing issues were noted and tabled for future iteration. It was incredibly satisfying to use my passion as a means to unbiasedly validate large business proposals such as this, whilst providing new and exciting value to our customers.

Key findings from final concept validation

• 01

  Understanding of concept was good from both user groups, as well as matching desired expectations/features of a app based audio product.

• 02

  Unknowns were comfortable with required registration access but did express distaste for the amount of personal details, not the specific details themselves.

• 03

  Radio content was seen as secondary to Podcast content largely due to the on-the -move use cases of mobile platforms.

• 04

  Smart mixed-media recirculation and content recommendations were seen as highly valuable once both apps were established.

• 05

  Although initially thinking otherwise, both user types saw advantages to audio content being hosted in a seperate app.

• 06

  At arrival to editorial app, unknowns expressed their desire to abandon the journey due to the current mobile paywall.

Take a look at the full concept validation playback to learn more.

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02 - Design refinement post validation

Working alongside a dedicated UI designer in an agile product team, I became the leading voice of UX in Times Radio: building out experience maps, fleshing out user journeys, collating and feeding back to stakeholders, formatting components for build and advising upon sizing when considering build scope. The above figma embed displays one such environment map that I produced to enable team to understand what we were building and at what stage. I take great satisfaction in being an individual that can facilitate a large mental model such as this.

Further testing sessions were conducted at later stages to validate focused design assumptions that arose for both UX and UI. These sessions were vital in solidifying MVP usability but also kickstarting V1 discussions and requirement gathering with stakeholders.

Take a look some of the design refinement testing to learn more.

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03 - Results

Times Radio is now one of the UKs most popular talk radio stations, often attracting listeners in their millions. Taking on a media giant such as the BBC with their talk radio station, Radio 4, was never going to be easy. However, Times Radio is quickly becoming the standard for not only existing subscribers to get their audio content, but acting as a highly performant funnel for new ‘unknown’ users to enter the brand.

I take great pride in not only the effort but also the output that myself and members of the team managed to produce in such a short amount of time. I learnt so much during the 6 months on the brief; walking into such a busy and sizable company such as News UK meant maintaining relationships with many stakeholders across various departments in the business such as marketing, editorial and commercial. Times Radio itself is not necessarily a complicated design brief but the multitude of working parts that went into producing it allowed me to gain a plethora of insight into various disciplines and expand knowledge of the product development process.

Thank you for following me through the design process of Times Radio. Please do get in touch if you have any questions about this piece of work, or would like to see anything on show here in greater detail.