THOMAS KLEPL

The CBC Radio website and mobile app were growing long in the tooth and had become siloed from other CBC online properties due to previous inward-looking organizational decisions. In addition to the audience experience, the publishing workflows were in need of major improvements in order to enhance radio producers' ability to deliver the great experience we wanted to create. An end-to-end overhaul was in order!

A special cross-functional agile team led by the director of digital radio content was assembled to create the new CBC Radio ecosystem. We kick-started the design process by reviewing audience and producer feedback and analytics reports, collected and generated new ideas, and uncovered the best and worst aspects of competing apps and sites. We formed a hypothesis that people wanted to listen to audio content not only by show but also by topic, easily access live radio, and do all of this in a seamless and integrated fashion. Together, we created a prioritized list of user stories and then started designing.

Information Architect

For this project, I created the foundation for both the audience and producer-facing user experience which included the new content model and taxonomy, the interaction structure for the new mobile apps and a redesigned workflow for producers.

Having just finished another major CBC project to implement new content management tools for CBC News and Sports, I approached the overhaul of the Radio ecosystem with the idea that the Radio content needed to be organized according to a common content model and taxonomy. This would allow the audience to easily discover topically relevant content of different media types (text, photo, video, audio) across the range of different properties (News, Radio, Sports, Entertainment). I used a combination of techniques including interviewing, story mapping, outlining, card sorting and wireframing to develop ideas and design the new experience. I worked closely with a visual designer and user researcher on this project.