In der Einleitung wird in das Thema eingeführt und die Rahmenbedingungen abgesteckt. Die Forschungsfrage / die Definition des Problems wird vorgestellt. Mögliche Leitfragen können sein: Was ist der Ausgangspunkt? Was ist die Motivation sich gerade dieser Herausforderung / diesem Problem zu stellen? Was ist die Herausforderung für die Idee oder die Designaufgabe?

First things first: What's the issue?

To find out about that we found many frequend NPR One users via reddit and facebook and had them asked many questions to help us find the main issue from a users perspective.

What App is it going to be?

In order to not just add new features to the existing app, but rather keep it simple and usefull we boiled the app description down to a

OneSentence ™:

Die neue NPRone ist eine Podcast-App mit der sich Radiohörer über sämtliche NPR-Podcasts informieren und diese anhören können, indem explorativ oder kontext-relevante Podcasts angeboten werden.

... including the issue we wanted to improve on.

Another great way of approaching the goal without getting lost is to look at the result from the future. So we wrote a small one column broad sheed article about our newly released redesign.

All, the interview answers, the OneSentence ™ as well as the „SZ“-article we often went back to later in the process, to, again keep the focus.

Looking at the anatomy of the existing NPR One app, one instantly notices the two single words „listen“ and „explore“ located in the top row, the active one simply being undelined. These were the two key screens for us to start off our redesign.

This existing visual simplicity we found to be great and decided to keep. Our main focus was on how to better display i.e. present individual podcasts episodes as well as podcast series within the explore section.

Soon in the process we decided to move the „user settings“ to the iOS app settings and get rid of the „search“ icon to keep the app simple and remove rarely used functinalities, making space for a third main section: the „catch up“ section. Here we wanted to give an overview on followed shows, NPR-news and other user-specific content.

Since the existing app didn't quite stick to its 2 level scoll down navigation, we decided to implement a strict drill-down navigation with modal-views (overlays) to display detailled information on a selected episode or podcast series.

Moving from wireframing to high-fidelity screendesign.

Our second main focus was the redesign of the actual podcast player. We instantly found it to be annoying, not being able to pause a podcast from within the explore section. For this scenario we designed a minimalistic mini-player located in the bottom row, adding just as much functionality as needed.

InVision, Marvel, Origami

Der Designvorschlag (Entwurf / Prototyp) wird im Fazit in Bezug zur Problemstellung diskutiert. Am Ende lohnt sich ein Ausblick, wie das Projekt weitergehen könnte / kann / wird.