PBS Website Redesign

Role:  Art Direction, Interaction + Visual Design

Have you ever had a project that you felt would never see to the finish line? This was definitely one of those. The main goal of this redesign was to merge PBS.org and the PBS video portal into one comprehensive, mobile friendly, responsive experience that could also be available to users on a variety of over the top platforms (Xbox, Roku, Apple TV, Chromecast). The challenge was to entirely rethink the visual language PBS uses to communicate the online brand; this included online and mobile user interactions, information hierarchies, color palettes, font families and video patterns. 

Story-telling tools

The introduction of hero bundles give us the ability to control and package our message in an easily digestible format. We came up with this concept to battle the lack of visual hierarchy on the previous version of the PBS.org website and to give users a quick overiew of the most important stories of the day.

A personalized experience

Creating a "user-hub", a place where users can quickly access all of the information directly related to their viewing habits, was a major goal for the redesign and we actively worked to find ways to introduce personalization features across the video experience . We wanted to give people greater control over the way they consume our content so we concepted a space that would allow people to quickly resume watching videos, get updates on their favorite shows, and see their watchlist and viewing history and access content from their local stations.

Shows

During this process we changed the aspect ratio of our show key art from 16:9 to 2:3 to better match industry standards and to make it easy for users to differenciate videos from shows. To promote discoverability, we designed an experience that allowed users to filter shows by genre. This gave them greater control in finding the kinds of content that was most revelant to them.