Say Hello to a New Listening Experience for WNYC.org

WNYC is proud to be wherever you are — on air, online and on mobile. We’ve launched an important redesign of the listening experience on WNYC.org that will make our connection to you even stronger. It improves how our users can listen to both the live stream and on-demand audio on WNYC.org. Instead of having a separate window open with a player in it (what we call the “pop-up” player) you will now be able to see what you’re listening to on the bottom of the page as you navigate the site. And it will stay with you.

When our previous audio player was released several years ago, it met the needs of an audience that primarily visited WNYC.org to stream live audio from their desktop computer. Needless to say, things have changed. Today, 40 percent of our digital audience connect with WNYC from a mobile device and increasingly access our content “on demand." Our digital products are adapting to support these changing needs.

Here’s what’s new about the user experience and design of the audio player.

In the past few years, we’ve created a robust feedback loop between our listeners and our in-house Digital Product and Technology team. In 2015 alone, we conducted a dozen user testing rounds, and many more user research initiatives. Using the knowledge gained, we created several different models of a new and improved web audio player and shared them with a sample group of people whose input matters most to us: you, our audience. In other words, you spoke and we listened. And we’ve listened a lot.

Based on our research, we saw a few issues with the current player experience:

• It was too easy to “lose” a pop-up player amongst all the browser windows you may have open. When it was time to pause, you had to search for the pop-up window. An annoyance, for sure. 
• It was even more annoying on a mobile browser, where it was cumbersome to toggle back and forth between the content you love on our site and the separate pop-up player.
• Saving segments of audio required that you do a not-so-simple back and forth dance between the pop-up player and the content pages on WNYC.org.
• There was no way to customize the playing order of saved audio to listen later in whatever sequence you prefer.

Here’s why the new WNYC audio player is such a better experience:

• It stays with you. This player docks at the bottom of WNYC.org, always visible. All in one place. 
• A re-imagined queue: we’ve replaced the “Saved Items” feature with an easy-to-load "Queue." The audio you add to your queue can be accessed from within the player and can be easily re-ordered to play what you want, when you want. 
• Want to hear something again? The new player gives you access to your history of listens. Use it to listen again or share audio with others via email, Facebook or Twitter.

In terms of visual design, it became obvious our player should reflect the content it is streaming or playing, the same way our story pages do. You’ll notice our new player changing color as new content gets played, using colors from the photo associated with the audio.

We'd love to hear your thoughts on our the new player. Just hit the blue feedback button on the player, or post your thoughts. 

But there's more...

Today’s launch of the new audio player also marks an important milestone for WNYC.org. It caps off a large, multi-year effort to make WNYC.org fully optimized for mobile devices.

It was a large scale effort which required rebuilding key aspects of WNYC.org’s technology platform from the ground up. It had been more than 7 years since a project of this magnitude had been undertaken and though much of the work was behind the scenes it was a critical foundation building for our digital future. Along the way we redesigned some of the most important pages on the site; most notably our show homepages, our story/episode pages and our online donation experience. To give you a sense of the magnitude of this effort, we rebuilt more than a dozen templates on the site, which are used to showcase 200 shows, podcasts, editorial channels and “tag pages,” which in turn host the 200,000 stories, episodes and segments that live on WNYC.org today.

What’s next?

Over the coming months we’ll be focused on several projects to improve the experience for live stream and on demand listeners even further. Next month, expect to see an announcement from us about the launch of beta.wnyc.org. One of our goals for much of our work this past year is to enable us to work more nimbly and get new product features in front of users more quickly. The beta site will be another important step towards that goal.

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Shout outs to:
Fiona Carswell (@drawingsbyfiona) for co-designing our digital products; Brian Whitton (@noslouch), Glenn Mohre (@barry_belmont), and Matt Walsh for building this. Alison Morgenstern (@xoxoalison) and Valentina Powers (@valentinabklyn) on the project management and operations side, Kelly Suitor and Javed Chowdry who find all the bugs, and Matt Oberle who makes sure our servers can handle anything.

Follow our team's work at @WNYCdigital.