Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Designing the future of digital broadcasting for Australia’s most trusted media organisation.
Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Designing the future of digital broadcasting for Australia’s most trusted media organisation.
July 2023
Joe McLachlan Design
Bella Miller Strategy & research
Kate Stone Project Management
Context
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation is an iconic, treasured public institution. Its influence spans all generations of Australians, and reaches every corner of the country.
The ABC approached Future Friendly with a ten-week project to define a unified vision for a product suite that would allow the ABC to deliver on their new 5 year plan, which had three key objectives: meaningfully engage emerging audiences, help audiences discover and follow the stories that matter to them and define our unique place in an increasingly crowded media landscape.
Problem
As modern audiences shift to digital platforms, such as web, streaming and mobile experiences, the ABC was struggling to capture emerging audiences — young people, in particular.
This emerging audience exhibited behaviours that were in stark contrast to the ABC's traditional audience: they were mobile and digital first, consumed content in less intentional ways, and were more wary to trust what they saw online.
While the ABC was creating a plethora of content for this audience, users weren't finding it. The ABC's digital platforms were siloed and fragmented, putting the burden on the user to find this content themselves, across tens of channels, platforms and experiences.
Process
The ABC empowered us to answer four key questions: How do we adapt to the changing behaviours of young people? How do we best design for on & off-platform journeys? What does a content centric experience over a product centric experience look like? How do emerging audiences perceive and value trust?
To help us build context for these questions, we collaborated with stakeholders across the entire ABC; facilitating 17 co-design and roadmapping workshops, and 16 subject matter expert interviews.
These questions formed the basis of our research and the prototypes that I built and brought to concept testing. Working in a two-week sprint cycle, I created 5 of these unique, high-fidelity prototypes that embodied hypotheses and ideas to be tested across 26 hours of 1-1 customer testing.
Solution
After nine weeks of rigorous testing, learning and refinement, we presented our validated vision for the future of the ABC: an experience that brings together everything the ABC has to offer, becoming greater than the sum of its parts.
One place to follow what matters to you, discover new content and stay engaged with Australian stories - making it essential to all Australians.
Follow what matters to you.
Giving users complete control of the content they want to see, from ongoing stories and topics, to specific ABC programs or personalities — all in one convenient experience.
Purposeful engagement. Serendipitous discovery.
The internet is not a broadcast medium, and this experience was designed to demonstrate how the ABC can leverage new formats, mediums and interaction patterns to create a fresh, yet familiar media browsing experience, accomodating intentional discovery of content, or casual browsing.
Never miss a moment.
Instead of siloing content by format or platform; grouping content based on topic, story, presenter or program into 'content threads' allows the user to stay connected to their interests across audio, video, written and interactive content.
"Having it all completely unified, one app that did everything. That would be great. If I knew I could access Triple J, news, podcasts in one app, I'd use it all the time. It would probably become my main news app for everything"
— User research participant responding to our mobile prototype
Impact
Beyond a comprehensive prototype of a future vision of the ABC digital experience, we also left the ABC with a clear roadmap for how to get there. This roadmap broke down each piece of work and design principle that had been uncovered over our 10 weeks or design research, and was made collaboratively with every arm of the ABC's digital product team.
Tim Hardaker, Group Product Manager at the ABC, and our key contact for this project, published the findings of this project on the ABC's official blog in November 2023, in which he wrote;
"Our teams have sprung into action, taking the Product Futures principles and applying them to their areas of focus. You'll begin to see the results of this soon, as aspects of the Product Futures strategy begin to roll out in our audience facing product experiences."
In August 2024, the ABC rolled out a redesign of the News platform, launching many of the recommended features and visual language from this project.
In September 2024, this project was awarded Best in Class as the Australian Good Design Awards, the highest individual award attainable for a category submission.