WRFU.net is a prototype website for a nonprofit community radio station in east central Illinois that offers live audio streaming, details about individual shows, and mp3 archives of past broadcasts. WRFU.net accomplishes this by using standard HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and custom audio plugins, within a content-managed site template.

As volunteer-led efforts, the website, radio station and sponsoring local independent-media collaborative have a history that is rich in innovation but is sometimes punctuated by changes in focus and direction of energies. As of mid-2017, this had resulted in a website that was not living up to the potential of the station and sponsoring collaborative, and was seldom visited. In a word, the look was distinctly 1990s: a pair of sparse, text-only pages, with unadorned links to some audio content:

My Role

I had lived in the radio station’s hometown for several years until about a decade ago, and I still listen to WRFU occasionally online and when I visit the area. As a fan of some of the local shows and someone looking to gain practical experience in web design and UX research, I contacted the station manager and technical lead in late spring and volunteered to lend a hand. They happily accepted, and we began communicating via email and phone so I could begin to learn about their needs. I began to lead development of the site in consultation with the station management and show hosts, and to utilize best practices in UX research to ensure creation of an outstanding resource for the station and its listeners. I have collaborated directly with the station’s key stakeholders and its sponsoring organization.

The Approach

I began to learn more about the station, its shows, and their hosts through the taking of a UX research approach. As parts of this approach, I attended the station’s monthly meetings over the summer, shared storyboard ideas and the results of my own competitive reviews of other community radio stations’ websites and the station’s own past sites over the years (on www.archive.org/web), and invited show hosts and other supporters to share their suggestions through both email and brief online surveys.

Through conducting these activities, I quickly came to understand that even the basic wrfu.net site met important goals for the station volunteers. Moreover, the hosts themselves were supplementing their online presence in ways aside from the website; several maintained Facebook sites, and a couple of others had pages on WordPress.com or maintained their own show archives on iTunes or other audio repositories.

Missing, though, was any way to connect these independently maintained sites to the overall station presence. Each of the hosts and their immediate supporters had a different skillset and preferences for their online presence, and they were generally not even aware of one another’s work. As we developed our communications, the benefits of building a more coherent station presence online became evident to all of us.

Two directions for moving forward appeared to be available. First, I could proceed to developing a prototype site in WordPress, and incorporate into it the full range of features that the station stakeholders claimed to value. I learned a good deal about how to implement these features through the competitive review I had undertaken, and through good old trial and error. As I proceeded, I shared the results of my work with the stakeholders on a weekly basis. The second direction was to investigate the potential for building the most important functionality into another existing website, operating on the NationBuilder platform, that was operated by the radio station’s sponsoring organization but that at the time had no radio station content except for a paragraph that described the station in only the briefest terms.

Prototyping proceeded in both directions. For the WordPress version, stakeholder advice took us from simple wireframes like this:

To a fully navigational prototype without images and with only basic templating:

To a fully functional prototype website with template design similar to that of the sponsor’s NationBuilder site and images provided by station volunteers:

Base WordPress functionality and available third-party plug-ins enabled features that stakeholders said were highly desirable, including the ability to retain and extend the sorts of show archives that were a feature both of the unadorned www.wrfu.net website and some of the hosts’ own repositories on iTunes and other remote sites, such as live listening:

Upcoming show calendars:

Shows listings and details pages:

And descriptive archives for shows’ complete histories in easy-to-navigate views:

The Discovery

The radio station’s show hosts, volunteers, and other stakeholders said they were very happy with the prototype. However, they were reluctant to go live with the site. They said they hoped for a website that would share as much as possible with the workings of the sponsoring organization’s site – not only the visual elements as in the WordPress prototype, but the back end as well. Two compelling reasons emerged this preference. First, the station website’s previous history suggested to them that it would be difficult to maintain an independent site, owing to frequent turnover of volunteer staff. Second, they hoped as much as possible to connect with the energies of the larger organization, and they believed that having their own website operate directly as a section of the NationBuilder site could be the best means to achieving that end.

Fortunately, the experience of having developed the WordPress site led me to improved understanding of how I might also expand my skill set further, to provide as much of the same functionality as feasible under the NationBuilder site’s architecture. Not everything was in fact doable. In particular, it was not possible to build archival features into the larger site’s interface, as there no plug-ins existed similar to those used in the WordPress prototype.

However, it did prove possible to build out other highly desired features as extensions to the larger site. Chief among these were the live player and shows schedule features:

And the overview page for the shows’ descriptions, with links to the shows’ own third-party platform sites such as Facebook pages, and to the original wrfu.net archives.

This turned out to be what stakeholders regarded as the most workable compromise between their ease of use and site integration goals, and their desired larger feature set that the WordPress site made possible. For this reason, it is how wrfu.net site design remains implemented as of early 2018.

Broader Insights

Among valuable lessons I have learned from volunteering on the WRFU-FM website redesign are these:

• UX principles and processes can contribute to the design process in important ways. The wrfu.net prototype benefited from thorough attention to stakeholder concerns and development of effective communication, and from use of techniques like conducting competitive and historical reviews, wireframing, A/B prototyping, surveying, and member-checking at key decision points.
• The best technical solution is not always the best overall solution for everyone involved. This became clear from the stakeholders’ emerging preference for a less technically elegant and complete website, in favor of one that would not only be easier to maintain but also fit better with existing practices – in this case, both the practices of the sponsoring organization and its NationBuilder-hosted site, and the practices of the individual shows’ hosts in maintaining their third-party sites on Facebook and other platforms.
• Development effort is not wasted even where it leads in directions that do not result in full implementation. Although the WordPress prototype I developed was not adopted in that form, at least up to now, the process of developing it led to discovery of effective ways to incorporate some of its functionality into the NationBuilder site. Additionally, the prototype’s innovations for past shows’ archival and shows’ detail pages can be revisited at any time, for potential incorporation into future rounds of development both with the WRFU site and other sites that might benefit from similar features, whether they are for radio stations or other purposes.