Late last year, iHeartMedia unveiled the largest refresh of the iHeartRadio app since it debuted in 2011. In the update, the company had several goals in mind but one stood out more than the others: make the experience for users feel familiar.
And what is more familiar to a radio listener than designing an app to more closely resemble the way a large chunk of consumers listen to the content? So, iHeartMedia was inspired by the in-car radio.
The app refresh included new features like a seek or scan button for users to find local stations on the homepage. Additionally, the iHeartRadio app update features presets for listeners, allowing up to 15 stations, playlists, podcasts, or artist radio stations to be accessible throughout the app.
While discussing the updates and new features, iHeartMedia Digital Audio Group CEO Conal Byrne shared that the company is already seeing encouraging results from making updates that were ultimately dubbed as “obvious” by those designing the update.
“The first thing you want in big product change is to hold the line,” said Byrne. “You don’t expect to grow day one by 1000%. We are not holding the line. We are already growing. That is a wonderful surprise.”
He shared that the idea to mix the functionality with an in-car experience — like a scan or seek button coupled with presets — with a digital app led to users feeling as if the new features were now essential to the digital experience.
“While our scan button feels already like a ‘nice to have’ for users — let’s not say it’s bad or good, just it’s a ‘nice to have’ feature — presets is already a ‘need to have’ feature. It feels very clear like our one day, one in the first few thousand users that jumped in, this is now an essential part of their iHeartRadio app experience,” Byrne continued.
“I’ve been doing product a long time. I have not seen that. I honestly have not seen a product that users have acclimated to that fast, where it’s become a core part of their UX. That has driven up our average time spent already, on average, new users downloading the app, new versus our control group, stuff like that. I hope it keeps going in that direction, obviously. But we’re really heartened by that.”
People hate change. No matter the situation. So when a company like iHeartMedia undergoes the process of updating something as familiar as the iHeartRadio app, you have to be careful in how you go about that update. So, for nearly a year, a team of top leaders and executives from departments at the radio giant formed a Product Council to opine on what a refreshed app needed.
The leaders came to recognize that the car radio dashboard, which, obviously millions of radio consumers are intricately familiar with, was “one of the single greatest product UX inventions ever by humans.”
“The goal of any at-scale product is sleekness, beauty, scalability, but above and beyond anything else, it’s to get your learning curve to almost zero. It’s absolute convenience and intuition. And I truly don’t know many products that match the car radio dashboard for that,” Byrne said.
Some coming to that realization led the designers down a path that made them use the term “obvious” multiple times. It was obvious to make the app as familiar as possible for users. It was obvious for the company to implement features the car radio includes. And it was obvious that after more than 100 years since the 1922 Chevrolet could be equipped with a Westinghouse radio dial, there hasn’t been much functional change in the product offering because it is obvious that it works.
“If you have enough even half intelligent — and I hope they were half intelligent — conversations with the smart folks who run their different departments at iHeartMedia, from broadcast radio programming to analytics, from engineering to marketing by conversation three, people are going to start repeating sentences like, ‘I don’t know. I just want it to look like the thing in the car.’ And the difference with this round of brainstorming was that we — and I’ll give us this credit — were open to that,” Byrne stated.
“Whereas before, where product teams sometimes miss the mark is, you will try to translate that into ‘I think what you mean is this.’ No, I literally mean that thing. The best digital can do is take a concept like presets and quite literally translate it into digital and then build on it. As opposed to saying, ‘Well, I think by presets what you mean is a recommendation engine.’ No, I do not mean that. I mean literally presets.
“Now, it should function like the long press functionality of apps on your iPhone. Sure, it should function like that. But no. Otherwise, I literally mean the presets thing. I think, honestly, that was the difference for us was being open to it, and then keeping ourselves honest about what it meant to translate it into digital.”
Byrne added that there were features the company investigated in adding to the revamp that didn’t make the cut.
“Another source of inspiration we initially looked at was TV, and specifically cable news TV. We were looking around for different UX — this was one before we locked into the car dash — and we tried to sort of let in that inspiration of, to their credit, they are using that TV screen, that space, innovatively for their world.
“It looks more like a web page than it did 10 years ago. There’s a bunch of different stuff. There are right rails on certain cable TV news channels. There are tickers. So an example of that that we played with for a second was a news ticker across the bottom of the screen, because we said, ‘There must be something working about cable TV news that that is so prominent across them all.'”
However, the focus groups for the new app were “allergic” to the feature, Byrne said, adding that users felt as if they had lost some of the control over the app in the process.
“That’s what made us say, ‘Ok, the idea is right. The execution is off.’ Let’s just take what we have in the background that we share with our own programmers. create a trending on iHeart section, that’s a little bit like trending on X, and start there. It’s a good example though of us saying ‘Eh, not so fast.'”
When asked if iHeartMedia expected other radio or digital audio companies to implement similar strategies in later versions of their apps, Byrne responded with an idiom.
“The greatest compliment to an artist is when someone traces your work,” he said with a smile. “I think the unfair advantage we have is we reach nine out of 10 American adults a month through 950-plus broadcast radio stations. We have the ability to shout very loudly about the work we do. I will take it as a compliment and I won’t be too concerned. We hold ourselves to a very high standard with or without competition nipping at our heels. It won’t bother us too much.”
The iHeartRadio app will continue to evolve in 2025, Byrne told Barrett Media. He shared that there is a “product roadmap” for the year, with new features being expanded in the first and second quarter, noting that — depending on user feedback — there could potential be a whole new set of features to discuss later this year.
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