Year:
2021
Industry:
Media
Company:
Virgin Radio
Methods:
Mixed-method user research
Information architecture
User experience
Workshop facilitation
UI design
Overview
Virgin Radio UK is a national broadcaster known for its high-profile presenters and growing digital content. With new talent onboard and more audio content than ever, the website needed to catch up.
The challenge
The existing site was built on a rigid legacy platform that hadn’t kept pace with user expectations or the needs of the business. It wasn’t responsive, relied on an external radio player, made content hard to find, and gave editorial teams very little flexibility.
The business was investing heavily in talent and podcast content, but the website wasn’t set up to support it.
We needed to rebuild from the ground up—improving usability, integrating listening, and modernising the platform.
At the same time, I had to work within Virgin’s strict brand framework, alongside multiple internal and external stakeholders. Nothing moved quickly, and getting sign-off required clear rationale, tested ideas, and a strong grip on priorities.
Getting aligned early
As the only designer, I led research, IA, prototyping, stakeholder management and testing. One of the first steps was mapping out the priorities and constraints across product, editorial, commercial, engineering, SEO and the Virgin brand team.
Everyone had different goals, and the only way to move forward was to bring them in early. I ran alignment workshops and presented low-fidelity wireframes to focus the conversation on functionality and avoid getting bogged down in visual details too soon.
Understanding the audience
We didn’t know much about our digital users, so I ran two rounds of research using UserZoom:
A survey of 450 users, carefully screened to reflect the Virgin audience
Follow-up interviews with 15 highly engaged listeners
The insights weren’t groundbreaking, but they were important. Presenter loyalty came through strongly—people came for specific shows and voices. Audio content was often used in the background, and users saw it as a kind of daily companion. This shaped the way we structured show pages and influenced the content hierarchy.
It also uncovered friction points, like how hard it was to re-find a segment they'd enjoyed. That insight directly led to adding a “recently played” feature.
Closing the gap
Compared to competitors like BBC Sounds and Absolute Radio, Virgin was well behind on core product features. It had no podcast pages, no responsive layout, no way to browse or discover content natively. Even basic playback kicked users out to a third-party site.
I ran a competitive audit to make this gap visible to the business. That helped shift the mindset from “visual refresh” to rebuilding core features that users had come to expect.
Structuring for scale
With more content coming through editorial every day, we needed an information architecture that wouldn’t collapse under its own weight.
I facilitated working sessions with SEO, marketing, and editorial teams to map out a scalable structure. We then validated this with users via open and closed card sorts:
77% agreement in open sorting showed the groupings made sense
92% correct placements in the closed sort confirmed our structure held up
We made small adjustments, but the core hierarchy stayed intact. The validation gave teams confidence in the direction.
Designing for how people actually listen
The biggest shift was replacing the external radio player with an integrated one. It was a small change with a big impact. Users could now continue listening as they explored the site. Session duration improved, bounce rate dropped, and users were finally staying inside the experience.
Designing this involved close collaboration with engineering—handling playback persistence, stream buffering, and content caching across pages. We stress-tested designs early to avoid surprises late in the build.
Building within constraints
The UI was built using our internal multi-brand design system, layered with a Virgin-specific skin. Brand guidelines were tight, and everything went through layered approval. But even within those constraints, there was room to improve layout variety, fix affordance issues, and clarify how shows, presenters and podcasts were linked.
The new interface surfaced more relevant content and made the overall experience feel more modern without drifting off-brand.
Testing with users
I ran two rounds of remote usability testing:
A prototype round to catch early friction
A validation round post-iteration
Changes from these sessions included:
Adding a “recently played” audio history
Improving layout diversity to reduce visual fatigue
Clarifying how playback worked across devices
Working with engineering
This wasn’t just a design facelift. We were also migrating to a new CMS and frontend stack. I worked closely with engineers to:
Prioritise SEO-critical templates during migration
Adapt designs to caching and stream playback constraints
Flag any blockers early so we didn’t waste effort on ideas that wouldn’t ship
The focus was always on getting to value fast and avoiding downstream rework.
Impact
+23% increase in content engagement year-over-year (measured via internal data warehouse)
Increases across listening hours, podcast starts, and catch-up completions
Bounce rate fell significantly after switching to the on-site player
Editorial and commercial teams had more flexibility to manage and surface content
Some of this uplift came from the arrival of new presenters, but the sustained improvement in engagement came from fixing the experience and making audio content easier to access.
Personal retro
The biggest challenge was balancing usability with brand oversight. Getting sign-off required careful documentation, tested thinking, and patience.
Looking back, I’d push for clearer OKRs earlier in the project. It would have helped focus stakeholders and made it easier to tie design decisions back to specific business outcomes.