mobile application
Sinclair Broadcast’s previous mobile apps looked dated, performed poorly and eroded user trust in their stations’ brands. In my role as Senior UX designer, I lead a user experience initiative that included a major design upgrade, performance improvements and a new look and feel the stations can be proud of.
My responsibilities included wireframing, stakeholder presentations, prototyping and visual design. My goals were to create brand loyalty and significantly decreasing user abandonment of our apps by providing a reliable user experience.
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Sinclair Broadcast’s previous mobile apps looked dated, performed poorly and eroded user trust in their stations’ brands. In my role as Senior UX designer, I lead a user experience initiative that included a major design upgrade, performance improvements and a new look and feel the stations can be proud of.
My responsibilities included wireframing, stakeholder presentations, prototyping and visual design. My goals were to create brand loyalty and significantly decreasing user abandonment of our apps by providing a reliable user experience.
Provide a reliable user experience so people can stay informed & connect with their communities.
watch video
Legacy apps.
Research informed our navigation model
Screen views (in thousands) from the top performing apps in sept 15′ informed navigation priorities.
Iterations from early to final stages
Using prototyping tools I communicated to stakeholders our ideas from the wireframe stage all the way to high fidelity comps. I could then test these prototypes with real people and get feedback to improve the experience.
Feedback from research
Some of my initial ideas about how discover more categories for each station were refined based on feedback from my lab studies. See some of the feedback below:
“I didn’t know I could tap the words”
“I really like the branding”
“I’m not sure what the ‘plus’ is”
“clean and easy to read”
Final High Fidelity Designs
Based on research, stakeholder interviews, & data from our previous app we were able to craft the final designs based on our end customers needs & goals. They appear below.
Stay Informed. Our users come to stay informed by reading stories and watching videos. Condense the legacy app top app views into five categories for easier consumption on a smaller device.
Stay alert. Since news can happen at any time, allow users to receive alerts for breaking news, school closings and weather.
Connect with others. Sharing is an important aspect for the news business. As such, having sharing controls in multiple places is beneficial.
Customize. Organize stories into categories such as entertainment, sports or politics which users can add or remove from their main feed. Tooltips help a user navigate through this experience.
Highlight Live Content. If the broadcast is live, emphasize the live content. By categorizing videos into a single tab, badges can highlight live content in a pattern users understand.
Know the Weather. People want to know their local weather to help plan their day. The weather experience must show the current conditions, 10-day forecast, latest weather cast and radar.
Outcome.
A few months after the rollout to all of our news stations we noticed increases most of our key performance indicators. We saw increases in users, sessions, screen views, screens per session, and average session duration. The largest increase was in screen views, which increased 46% from Q2 to Q3. The new apps have a major impact in an area that Sinclair has been trying to succeed in.
