What is RTÉ Radio?
RTÉ is Ireland’s public service media organisation and RTÉ Radio is a responsive web audio platform for RTÉ's Live and on-demand audio. It replaces nine existing radio station websites and three audio catalogues with a shared system of web page templates, panels and components which allows editorial teams to publish and highlight the best RTÉ audio content.
Design Exploration
The brief and scope of the project was clarified by running workshops, sketching and developing a project document. From this, I was able to create wireframes for each page template and a clickable prototype.
The Design System
A design system for the RTÉ Radio product was developed based on the prototype and existing rte.ie foundations.
Panels
All page templates in the RTÉ Radio product are composed of panels, which are re-usable patterns that can be combined in different ways in order to create custom pages of content. Each panel and its states and variants were designed across all breakpoints.
Home Page
The curated radio home page acts as a central point for live radio and highlights the most recent and popular on-demand audio content.
Station Pages
Station pages function like the curated home page, but focus on content (including live radio) from a single radio station.
Show Pages
Show pages focus on the most popular and recent content for a specific radio show.
Episode & Clip Pages
Clips are edited highlights from full episodes e.g. an interview with a specific guest. Each clip and episode has it's own destination page with an audio player, tags, notes, playlist and a list of related clips.
Catalogue Pages
Catalogue pages are used to display a lot of searchable, filterable content. Some shows e.g. Documentary on One have large archives of evergreen content. The 'Shows' page allows users to search over 400 currently available radio shows.
Podcasts
Podcasts are treated the same as on-demand audio on the platform except cover artwork is displayed as square, rather than 16:9.
Live Video
Several RTÉ radio shows currently broadcast a live webcam video feed which can be streamed through a schedule-driven video player panel.
Search
The search input is available any time from the fixed navigation bar and leads to tabbed results for shows and podcasts, episodes, clips and stories in order of relevance or date.
Modals
Modal overlays are used on RTÉ Radio to:
+ Alert users that clicking a link while listening to audio will result in stopping the audio stream.
+ Display social sharing options for episodes and clips.
+ Display subscription options for podcasts.
UI Animation
Videos created in Principle were provided to developers to show how certain interactions and transitions should animate.
You can read a case-study about my design process for the RTÉ Radio project here.
