Design that sets you up for success.

RightNow Media’s core user focus has consistently been small groups since its origin as BlueFish TV in 1977. Small Group leaders informed our team of significant challenges to their groups: cohesive communication to drive discipleship. Through many conversations, interviews, and focus groups, the idea of a Group chat communication feature was born. I was tasked with designing an interactive chat experience utilizing Stream.io and integrating the experience in a seamless way with our mobile and web apps, while leaving the door open for future features to be added.

The Android and iOS apps for RightNow Media were outdated in design and their parity with the web applications. The development team decided to use Flutter for the rebuild to consolidate two codebases into one. I was tasked with developing a cohesive design language that would be familiar for users across both ecosystems and generate consistency between the mobile and web apps.

During the Web App & Internationalization effort, the vast array of styles and components exposed the obvious need for a design system. Having never before created a design system, I began the journey of researching and studying what makes a good design system and built a laughable first attempt. Over the years, the design system has evolved to become a living guide. It is far from perfect, but the journey has taught me the necessity for communication, data-driven decisions, and humility.

I worked with the RightNow Media software, marketing, and product teams to redesign and prepare their web app for the global expansion into multiple languages and regions. This redesign spawned many additional projects along the way. Major challenges were COVID lockdowns, communication trials with the development team, setbacks around multiple languages and characters, and a general lack of external user testing. After launch, RightNow Media saw increase in video playback, organization adoption, and increased retention.

COVID lockdowns exposed, among other things, unique needs from RightNow Media’s core group of account owners: churches. Thanks to the lockdowns, churches were holding meetings and services virtually. While a majority of churches already had tech in place to handle this shift, many did not. I was tasked with the role of designing a virtual meeting platform for users to start a video meeting, watch content together and keep it in-sync across all devices and attendees, and chat via text or video.

RightNow Media has a training platform, affectionately dubbed, “Interactive Content.” This platform is used by both business and church organizations to create a variety of content that can be assigned or discovered on the app. I was tasked to overhaul the UI and experience for both creators and viewers of the content. The initial redesign accomplished the goal of making the content easier to create and more delightful to view.

I was tasked with updating the UI and overall UX of RightNow Media’s internal video and content curation tool in lieu of the internationalization effort. This was tricky, since the original platform was built mainly to handle English. We also introduced regional Experiences, a way to curate and organize languages and content based upon geographic regions. One of the really nice things about this project was that all of our users and stakeholders were internal, which made it pretty seamless to design, test, iterate, build, test, etc.

RightNow Media has Android, FireTV, Roku, and Apple TV apps that were behind on feature parity with the web and mobile apps. The primary need was to overhaul the UI and UX to allow for previous internationalization efforts. Due to the fact that in-house engineers were not versed in most of the languages to redesign these apps, I was tasked to oversee the design portion of the development that was done by 3rd party contractors.