From 2006 through 2010, I built the UIE podcasting endeavor from an experiment into a series of more than 150 episodes downloaded around around the world, hundreds of thousands of times. We hired a producer to continue the project full-time as I transitioned to a primarily design role.
In 2016 and 2017, I co-designed a stand alone site that would be come the home of the UIE Podcast Network, home to UIE podcasts and those of other designers in the future.
What were Brian’s roles?
Concept, research, visual design, sketching and low-fi prototyping UI and layout, information architecture.
Who else was involved?
Full-stack designer/developer (worked on visual design, high-fidelity prototyping, built a podcast-specific CMS, designed the web-based editor, wrote all production code), and the podcast producer.
What’s the customer problem?
Designers need quality design resources to improve their skills, and turn to the expert curation of UIE to help them know what’s best. UIE podcasts introduce people and concepts that are changing the field of design.
What were the business considerations?
UIE uses content marketing to draw attention to their products and services. Podcasting is one of the free resources given away to drive attention to, for example, speakers and topics that will be featured in an upcoming conference.
The distribution side of the UIE podcasts needed updating. Podcasts were living within a blog that was coming to its end of life. With the intent of growing the podcasting beyond UIE’s core shows, and to invite others impactful designers on to UIE’s platform, the podcasting product needed a specialized home.
Additionally, this app would serve internal customers. A web-based user interface was built to allow employees to upload podcasts to the feed as well as edit the content and meta data that surrounded the shows.
We pared down the initial concept to an MVP that could replace the complete functionality of the existing podcast capabilities, and extended them to allow independently branded sub pages for individual shows, allowing UIE to spin up new shows as soon as deals were established for them. This allowed the project to be built in between other projects that had been higher up on the priority list.
Outcome
Live site:
http://uie.fm/
Web archive (just in case):
https://web.archive.org/web/20180105070951/https://uie.fm/
Regrettably, moving fast, I didn’t save most of the preliminary work. We quickly hopped right into designing templates for the pages directly in CSS, beginning with our Pattern & Style Library, and extending it as needed.
