iHeartRadio Family App WebsitE

Building a new homepage that showcases our Family App to parents and their kids. 🏡 👪

my role

UX Research, Customer Experience Strategy, Visual Design 

I identified and created innovative UX&CX opportunities for the website through synthesizing existing user research, partnering with multiple teams/directors/C-suite Executives of the organization, and competitive analysis of other streaming platforms. 

I translated user & business needs into wireframes, high fidelity mockups and animated interaction flows. 

The Team: 

Director of Product Innovation

Director of Marketing

Director of UX

UX Researchers

Chief Creative Officer

Customer Care Team

Analytics Team

The Length:

April - May 2020

what is the iheartFamily app?

iHeartRadio has taken all our most popular kids’ content from sing-alongs to audiobooks, to radio stations, and put it all in one special place, iHeartRadio Family. iHeartRadio Family is a new stand alone app featuring music from today’s most popular acts like Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez, Sam Hunt on great stations like Radio Disney Junior, iHeartCountry Kids, and North Pole Radio.

Plus music from characters that kids know and love from hit shows on Nickelodeon, Disney, PBS and more! The app also comes with a neat Parental Control feature where parents can monitor what goes in their kids’ ears if and when needed. 

Problem

 There is no existing website that showcases our iHeart Family App which makes it difficult for parents and kids to get an overview of:

•  What type of content we serve

•  What devices the app is available on

•  What the family brand entails  

 ROI/Market Opportunity

 Helping users understand the full footprint of our platforms in iHeart Family, guiding them to where they can be downloaded, and highlighting the size of our catalog should see increases in installs, unique users, and total listening hours across the Family brand. 

 Primary KPIs 

• Increased Reach (CUME)

• Increased Total Listening Hours (TLH) on Family apps 

• Increased installs across platforms 

Process

Getting our key team members aligned

I met with the User Researchers, Marketing, and Product Innovation teams to align on business goals and user pain points. 

•  Marketing needs : From data received from the analytics team, it was suggested that we keep install CTAs at the top half of the screen, since that’s where our users spend more of their time clicking and searching for information. 

•  Previous UX Research: To get a better understanding of the depth of the issues and to give us a more strategic starting point, I began synthesizing the previous research results (interviews + surveys) and identified a few repeating themes that came to the surface.

Themes found from synthesis

Previous UX Research: To get a better understanding of the depth of the issues of and to give us a more strategic starting point,

• I synthesized previous research results (interviews + surveys from customers) around all things iHeartFamily

• Then, identified a few repeating themes that came to the surface and narrowed them down to the 3 most valuable areas to focus on and presented them to the team

Calling customer care

I met with the Customer Care team to get more clarity on the pain points our users were having based off what was revealed from the research synthesis findings. 

The team confirmed that they saw an average of 5-6 customers bi-weekly write in to them requesting guidance specifically with the iheartFamily product/servce in the following areas:

areas for innovation

With these findings we decided to jump on the opportunity for innovation by introducing

• A FAQ section which would have answers to the most common questions asked, ultimately acting as the first point of contact for customers wanting answers before they decide to reach out directly to the customer care team. 

• A review section which can help boost SEO and builds credibility & trust with our current customers and potential customers.

• I also met with our Chief Creative Officer to help shape the voice and tone of our website and was able to keep it consistent all the way down to our FAQ section as well. Ultimately, strengthening our brand presence and creating distinction from our Flagship App.

Competitive Research & Analysis

To get an idea of where to start and what’s trending n the market within the same space and slightly outside of it, I did a competitive analysis and highlighted key takeaways that we can potentially apply to our website, and presented them to the team.

Sketches to Wireframes & Decisions

Once the team and I finalized the direction we should and can take, I played around with a few ideas and concepts and got feedback and direction from the team.

Ideas that did end up working out:

• Carousels that serve to help our users browse content. (Similar to a catalog.) We already introduce this pattern across our Apps and other platforms, so it was an easy transition to put on to the website as well.

• Benefits Section that supports the storytelling & serves as a “How it Works” section. Originally I had come up with a “how it works” section but after getting feedback, we felt the experience was overall intuitive, and instead showing what value iheartFamily brings from the rest of the competitors is more beneficial.

• Animations across the site to appeal to kids. After chatting with the rest of the design team, we felt it would be a nice opportunity to introduce a new element to the site.

• Introducing a new mascot/character to help with brand recognition. Our App currently has characters on the logo as well as on the Live Radio station experience on web. With guidance from our Chief Creative Officer, we created a Robot like friendly monster who appears at the bottom of the page. The hope, is that this sets the stage for our eventual App re-design on mobile and other platforms as well.

• FAQ Section

• Review Section
  

Ideas that didn’t end up working out:

• Showcasing content by grouping them into Age ranges. This concept didn’t work out, due to the fact that none of our content was tagged on the back end with an age. It would have taken the Data Science and Analytics Team a long time to be able to bring back that information for us.

• Widgets that allow for visitors to preview content. Due to legal reasons, we didn’t have the rights to some of the content to play on the site.

• A Conversation messaging system (aka a Chatbot but with a real person). The idea here was to get really innovative and give our customers real-time chat support where they get to talk to someone directly from our customer care team when they had issues. This would allow for a human-to-human experience and allow us to not only get a chance to understand our customers in a more personal way, but also decrease the flood of messages our customer care team gets on a regular basis. A win-win! However, due to business priorities, scope creep, and no research available to validate this recommendation, we had to put it in our parking lot and revisit it in the near future.

limitations & constraints

• Time! Not enough capacity on the research side to test before launch. The P.I. team had their own deadlines to meet that required us to get this in front of our customers much sooner. 

• Our researchers were only a team of two and their hands were tied with other priorities.

• We did our best to make sure we did enough market research and synthesized previous research that was done around the app to help make the best calls. We also involved our Chief Creative Officer to give feedback and guidance on how we can storytelling in a way that makes our brand shine and is appropriate for a younger audience. 

outcome

We launched the website at the end of Q2 of 2020. Since then, we have been measuring the engagement of the website and have seen an impressive increase in customer downloads across all platforms and a decrease in questions sent to customer care related to the iHeartFamily app. With continuous qual and quant testing, we hope to iterate where needed to improve the discoverability and awareness of the iHeartFamily brand and App.

Had we had more time

• I would’ve loved to lead the testing with users during and after the process and see if we were truly clever with our design decisions or if there was something we overlooked and missed.

• Additionally, I think testing this with kids from different age groups and digging deeper into how they think and how they gravitate towards the animations and quirky parts of the website would’ve brought value and impact to our direction.

• From a branding perspective, It would be interesting to take it one step further by giving our iheartFamily mascot(s) found on our app logo a re-vamp and have it be consistent with the mascot we experimented with on our new website. Testing the brand presence with our users would’ve been an interesting & eye-opening challenge.