CG Spectrum
Helping an online VFX & Digital Animation School connect with their students and alumni through a brand new podcast with industry professionals.
The goal of the project
To build out a new section on the CG Spectrum website that showcases a fortnightly podcast.
My role
Lead the UX Design Process and handed over to development, as well as a small part in UI using some existing styles and modules we have already designed for the website.
The brief
CG Spectrum have been a client with Honest Fox for quite some time now, so we were already aware of the audience and didn’t have a need for a proper discovery phase for this addition to the website. We had an entire library of components to use when it came to designing the new section of the website, and had a solid brief from the team to get this project underway.
Something that we also needed to consider was the Information Architecture for this new section of the website. The site itself is already quite busy, but the intention of this podcast was for it to be focus point for additional learnings and information.
What we did know was that the podcasts were going to be released every fortnight, and were going to include a guest who is an industry professional in the world of game or movie design, effects and animation. We also needed to make sure there was a home page for the newest episode and past episodes, a general listing page with all episodes, and a transcript/detail page.
Goal of the Podcast section
A huge part of the podcast section on the website was to build excitement around the content that CG Spectrum are producing, and to almost have some ‘hype’ about the guest speakers and topics that are discussed. A lot of these guests have worked on massive Hollywood films and video games which pretty much sells the content itself, but we were able to think of a few ways to get some further interest for the podcast.
We wanted to make sure that the users could listen to the podcast on their favourite streaming platforms, access video content on YouTube and also be notified of new episodes through subscribing to the podcast mailing list. Another thing that was included was a countdown timer across the sites so the users knew that the content was constantly being updated with new videos.
Making sure that it was easy to add new content was a huge part of the design as well. We needed to make sure that in the back end of the site that updating one card or hero module would reflect into listing cards which would prevent the CG Spectrum team from making multiple updates of the same image to different card styles.
Wireframes of the new Podcast pages
The podcast section was broken up into three simple yet effective pages to showcase the content, platforms the episodes were available on and some information about the hosts. From left to right, you’ll see the ‘home’ page of the podcasts where there is the latest episode featured for video and audio, some previous episodes and information about the hosts, a listing page with all episodes and a transcript page.
Conclusion and Key Takeaways
This project had a pretty quick turnaround and it was great to be able to get the outcome within a short timeline. The podcast is now thriving and being updated by the client with new information and episodes regularly, which is great to see, and making sure that we focussed on having the ability for them upload content easily has definitely helped.
Being resourceful with existing modules and making small tweaks was great from a resourcing perspective too, it meant that we didn’t need to bring the UI team into the process and was entirely completed by myself in the design process with one developer implementing the pages.