case studies: PBS
Industry
Media and Publishing
Client
PBS is "America's largest classroom," offering educational media to help children prepare for success. PBS provides written materials and video content proven to improve critical literacy skills in young children, and links teachers, parents, and PBS community contributors around the nation.
Challenge
PBS has a portal that connects the public television community of stations, producers, and programming distributors around the country. The portal serves over 1 million pages of content to a diverse staff with varying needs. The site had issues with information architecture, content structure, and an outdated search tool. It also lacked social media features that would engage audiences and connect the public television stations to one another.
Solution
NavigationArts was hired to design a new user experience for the portal, with a specific focus on providing a useful search experience and building social media functionality.
Before the redesign, NavigationArts conducted extensive user research, including key stakeholder interviews. Results indicated significant user frustration: search barely functioned and/or malfunctioned; architecture was unintuitive; and there was very limited ability to connect peer-to-peer.
To tackle these issues, NavigationArts implemented a faceted search taxonomy that allows PBS content managers to tag content across topics and disciplines. The user interface design for the search pages incorporates visual cues that make searching an intuitive and attractive experience that encourages deeper dives into related content.
Another critical addition to the portal was the incorporation of social media features to engage audiences. NavigationArts implemented various widgets and social media applications that resulted in a very sticky online resource, including forums, shout-outs, shared content, and chat.
Project Results Included:
- Creation of a positive user experience across the portal
- Transformation of internal site search from a dead end to a highly useful navigation method
- Incorporation of social media functionality to drive audience engagement and connect public television stations around the country