Highlighting Public Radio’s Unique Value
Throughout this third rotation of the Public Radio Incubation Lab, our team has focused on meeting the needs of two distinct groups: NPR Member stations and end users of NPR’s digital products. We’ve done our best to maintain this focus even while so much has changed in our world since the first days of the Lab in mid-February. The onset of the COVID-19 crisis forced us to drastically change our methods and our mindset. Meanwhile, public radio’s unique mix of local and national content has become more important than ever.
As the end of this Lab rotation neared, we set out to test our ideas with real-life media consumers one final time. Incorporating feedback gathered from NPR Member station staff during our previous study (outlined in our last blog post), we designed a final version of our NPR.org prototype and recruited seven user study participants using the userinterviews.com tool.
Our final prototype consisted of four components for highlighting Member station value:
- In-line messages within NPR.org text stories
- “Sticky bar” messages which pop up from the bottom of the screen
- A member station “drop down menu” on the NPR.org mobile header
- An audio “welcome message” from a Member station
Our hope was that when these messages were used together they would help new NPR.org users gain an awareness of their member station and the value of local public radio offerings.
As with our other user studies, we made a concerted effort to recruit a pool of young, diverse media consumers. This study included three men and four women, ranging in age from 20 to 35. Six identified as people of color and they were geographically distributed across seven states in the Northeast, South, and Southwest.
This final study confirmed many of the findings from our previous two end user studies. Most of our participants had some level of familiarity with NPR, but few had any awareness of their local Member station. Member station messages in all three prototype components were positively received and helped reinforce the connection between NPR and Member stations while offering pathways for discovery of local station content.
One new finding of this study was that users found in-line messages much less obtrusive than sticky bar messages. Nearly all users naturally skimmed past in-line messages to continue reading the article on NPR.org. Sticky bars, which pop up from the bottom of the screen, caused users to stop and either interact with the message or close the sticky bar. Because of the differences in the way users interact with these two spaces, the Lab recommends that sticky bars be reserved for messages that make a direct ask of users (e.g., for an email or donation). We envision that in-line messages would be a more appropriate place for general station messages for local programs, events, or community partnerships.
To get a sense of how these messages can help guide a new user through their experience on NPR.org, we compiled this montage of user reactions. In the video below, you’ll see two users with little or no knowledge of NPR or their Member station come to a better understanding of the local/national partnership that makes the public radio network uniquely valuable.
After concluding our final user study, the Lab sat down to make final refinements to our proposed concept. This final concept can be summarized by saying:
Our local-national network is what makes public radio uniquely valuable, but not everyone knows that.
We can make it easier for new users to discover our value by creating spaces for station-driven messaging across NPR platforms.
We explored the many ways this idea could be implemented on NPR platforms during our final presentation (click here to view the full presentation) and a concluding blog post which will be posted soon. Thanks for following along!
