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Case

BNR - Continuous User Involvement

BNR - Continuous User Involvement

One of the core FDMG brands is BNR Nieuwsradio, a Dutch business-orientated radio station that stands out for its continuous news broadcasting. From studios in Amsterdam and The Hague, BNR publishes daily news bulletins on national and international news. BNR is also known for its wide variety of high quality podcasts.

In order to facilitate their long term goals BNR Nieuwsradio has initiated a re-platforming of BNR.nl that should offer them more room for scale, development and efficiency.

This technical migration focused mainly on the backend systems, but offers opportunity for improvements in the frontend and their connection with their audience.

Ask

FDMG asked us to help them with the optimization of the user experience of BNR.nl.

FD Mediagroep

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Answer

The question of BNR was quite broad, so we defined a strategy that would help us navigate their ask and come up with an actionable plan to move forward: start small!

We wanted to start small in order to test the waters first, as well as to show the value of our approach to the client and the fact that it didn’t interfere with their day-to-day business goals, but was actually beneficial to them.

Image:

UX/PO session to decide on the next steps for BNR Podcasts.

The area we moved forward on was closely connected to BNR's core goal: engage with their listeners through relevant content, and inspire them through their offering for as long as possible and as often as possible.

A good starting point for that is their podcast portfolio, and that is where we started.

Image:

User involvement session; interviewing one of our BNR listeners.

UX/PO session to decide on the next steps for BNR Podcasts.User involvement session; interviewing one of our BNR listeners.

Elaboration programs & podcasts.

Elaboration programs & podcasts.

Way of working

First we worked together with the in-house design team to understand the brand, the stakeholders, the way of working and the way they made their day-to-day choices. We stayed connected to the team throughout this project.

With the insights we observed and gathered, we started the next phase of our Human Centred Design approach where we engaged with:

Business stakeholders: Through workshops where we collected their needs, requirements and business wishes. These workshops, presentations and storytelling allowed us to pro-actively involve the stakeholders in the product development process.

Audience of BNR: We used existing research findings and supplemented them with our own hypotheses and insights gained from continuous user involvement which allowed us to get a better understanding of the user needs.

These combined insights served as input for meaningful concepts, which we developed and verified (yes, again) with the potential users and stakeholders. This validation loop enables a structural injection of insights to improve the user experience of BNR.nl and make it run more efficiently.

“The proactive collaboration with fresk.digital as part of our development team and the application of Human Centred Design, has provided us with meaningful insights and functionalities. In addition to contributing UX expertise, they professionally initiated an approach to optimize the digital application of the product strategies and the synergy between the product team and various stakeholders.”

Sjoerd Wolthers

CIO FD Mediagroep

Result

Because we started small, we were able to improve the user experience of this specific part of BNR.nl through new functionalities that were validated by both the audience of BNR and the stakeholders.

One of the concrete results is a new setup to combine linear and on-demand content, creating possibilities for editors to highlight or list shows and offer a more personal approach by introducing the hosts and adding trailers for these shows

Through our approach we were able to work together with our client in bringing improvements on both their platform and their way of working. This has now resulted in a more elaborate partnership where we will work together on their overall product vision and embedding this in a Human Centred way.

Continuous User Involvement; Intertwining Business goals and user needs

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