Stephen Colbert App

Project Overview

When Stephen Colbert left his post at the Colbert Report and took over as the new host on CBS’s The Late Show, he would be off the air until the new season started. Not wanting to lose touch with his devoted fan base, we decided to create a venue for Stephen to stay in touch. We designed a Steven Colbert branded podcast app where Stephen could publish audio and video clips to his fan base. We had very little time to design and develop the app from scratch. We wanted to create something that would live well after Stephen Colbert took the reigns behind the desk of The Last Show.

Project Type: Branded and Customised Podcast App
Industry: Entertainment

My Role

• UX Lead
• Principal UX Designer
• Podcast SME

What I Did

• Fan Interviews
• Staff Interviews
• Persona Development
• Workshop Facilitation
• Created UX deliverables

Information Architecture

ORGANIZING THE STRUCTURE OF CONTENT & FEATURES 

Screen Features

I listen to podcasts on a daily basis so I already had a good idea of what features were needed. I started with the primary screens a user would use and assigned the features we wanted to see on each one.

Screen Flows

Once I had determined the features that were needed for each screen I could start to stitch them together. This gave me, as well as the UI and Dev teams, a good overview of how the app screens were related. This also gave me the opportunity to find a few features that I had missed in the previous step.

Wireframes

COMPOSING SOLUTIONS THAT DELIGHT THE USER

Early Wireframes

After some quick whiteboard sketches (that got erased before I could get a photo of them) I produced my first round of wireframes. I started with a video feed and some menu ideas.

Problems Found
As per usual, my first ideas weren’t the best. I tried several different ideas that looked good on the whiteboard, but failed to do the job once we got to wireframes.

Final Wireframes

Iterations to Final Solution
I simplified the design considerably through several rounds of iterations and landed on something that we discovered worked really well, especially on a phone screen.

I chose a menu design that would allow for some customization and expansion to include other types of content once the show officially launched.

Additional Wireframes

Prototype

BUILDING A FUNCTIONAL MODEL TO TEST OUR IDEAS

Pixate Prototype

Because we had such a tight timeframe, we wanted to deliver a high-fidelity prototype to the development team that included all interactions and transitions, etc. We chose Pixate to create the prototype because it would allow us to create native protos that left little question for the dev team as to what we had envisioned.

We were able to share this prototype with Stephen Colbert and his team in New York and they loved it.

Let’s Work Together

LET ME KNOW HOW I CAN HELP

If you’re looking for advice on your next big idea or you are looking for a seasoned design leader to add to your team, send me note. I am always on the lookout for my next challenge.

LET’S TALK