RealNetworks: Radio Guide
Radio Service Re-design
RealNetworks circa 2004
RealNetworks had just shipped the Real Guide, which was a content service supporting the RealPlayer. The Music team wanted to revamp the Radio experience to align to the newly designed service.
Objective
The Radio Guide used to be a hot mess (I wish I had proof). It used to look like a spreadsheet with several columns listing out every attribute of the radio station.
Radio Dashboard
This was redesigned from the ground up. Some of the information that was in the Guide was moved into the dashboard as well as making the display ad feel more integrated into the UI.
The Guide
The original Radio Guide was designed as a scrolling spreadsheet table. I completely changed it from several to two columns to remove the need to scroll horizontally. This made the stations list easily more scannable.
Documentation
Before the age of Figma, it was the wild west when it came to design documentation, especially for a company with a small design team. Back then it required you to measure pixels in Photoshop, then export them to a graphic format to share with the developer. They originally were shared as individual graphics, which was a mess to track.
To aggregate individual files, I started to compile them into PDFs using InDesign. The rest of the design team followed suit as this made it easier to track design specs.