Backstory
A Fresh Design for a Seamless Mobile Experience
Nexstar Media Group, Inc., is the largest local television and media company in the US, with 200 television stations and network programming across 116 markets.
Nexstar returned to partner with Postlight to transform Nexstar’s fragmented digital presence into a fresh design optimized for mobile that allowed affiliates to easily update content and users to have a seamless experience on any device.
Strategy
Mobile-First With Ad Map Support
Nexstar aimed to drive a localized experience where on-the-go news consumers could easily consume content in their market on any device. Another goal: Enhance revenue by updating ad viewability.
Driven by a need for a flexible, modular, and mobile-first responsive design system, Postlight set out to create an experience that showcased Nexstar as a modern media company and deliver a federation of components to support local channels. A key construct for our success was the tight collaboration with key partners in Nexstar’s Product & Program Management teams.
Approach
From Concept to System
Our design team dove into discovery and concepting and developed three unique design systems. The winning concept — named “Theater and Library” — supports immersive experiences for watching media in a darker, theatrical environment and reading news as text in a clean, light experience. It also allowed for local brand support through color and visual options.
We also designed a new approach to navigation that can scale as content is added or removed. We then overhauled the alert banner focusing on hierarchy and the ability to support multiple concurrent alert types that notify the user of weather, breaking news, or other important information.
With the system designed on a modern grid, we were able to develop enhancements such as weather and news containers and multimedia elements such as photo and video galleries — all with variations for local affiliates.
Our ad viewability fixes allowed the federated design system to scale countrywide to each local affiliate while increasing monetization and reducing the risk of any poor ad experiences. We achieved success due to our tight collaboration with the Nexstar Revenue team to understand opportunities and how we could plan successful scale.
Outcome
Delivering a System and a Plan
We delivered a beautifully designed system in Figma and a comprehensive implementation plan that reduced the overhead of a traditional handoff. Through a hierarchical set of Confluence pages, developers had links to visual assets and measurements as well as a clear written description of how to support interactions, edge cases, or baseline rules for each component.
Postlight’s design system for Nexstar’s television stations was awarded a Global Media Award from the International News Media Association for Best Product Iteration.
