Imagining the future of online radio

I was called in the beggining of 2014 by the BBC as a freelance senior designer to team up with their design lead and run a series of 5-step design workshops which would create the base for the new iPlayer Radio proposition. The future of BBC Radio online.
The 5-step design process has been developed internally at the BBC but it relates direclty to the much talked about 5-day design sprint developed at Google Ventures. It was a great experience to run in total 3 sets of these cycles and many good ideas and much work came from it. It will be exciting to see how they take shape.

iPlayer Radio V2 is scheduled to start implementation in 2015, so until then not much can be shared, but a hint of the direction where things may go can be taken from the experiment I helped build while doing these design sprints, Radio Explorer.

sprint_day1 — Day 1 of a design sprint: Personas and use cases

user-testing2 — Running user testing sessions with simple paper prototypes allowed us to quickly test individual ideas with no influence from platforms or the visual layer.

feature-grouping — Grouping of feature propositions

Style cheat sheet

in preparation for the work ahead and as my last workstream I decided to create a simple reference document to serve a a common base for all designers working across radio & music.
Ultimately this will ensure that everybody starts from the same toolbox and will minimise unnecessary variations. Ultimately, this (and evolution via contribution) will help ensure consitent UX.