Planet Money Summer School 2020 Landing Page

The Planet Money production team had an idea to run a “summer school” series. This series consisted of 10 episodes (aka "lessons") that combined old Planet Money episodes and with new interviews and an “online final exam” (aka a tongue-in-cheek quiz” that provided students/listeners with a “diploma” after completion).

Since this was a special, limited run series, the Planet Money production team wanted a new, separate landing page that could be reached using a direct link that was separate from the show’s usual podcast show page. In this project, I was the sole designer of the page and developer for bespoke HTML embeds and CSS overrides. This project timeline was only a month long, with a hard launch date of July 8, 2020. During this time, I worked with a product manager, a podcast analyst, and Planet Money’s lead producer.

I first started with high-fidelity wireframes. I started with high-fidelity wireframes because the the landing page would utilize the overarching styles for the npr.org website. Thus, I only needed to consider how specific requirements for the series would display and how the designs would account for the full width of the page. (At the time, podcast episode pages only took up 2/3 of the width.) I considered both web and mobile experiences, as listeners could visit this landing page both on desktop browsers and directly on their phone, which is where most people listen to their podcasts.

I showed these designs to other designers on the design team and the product manager, podcast analyst, and show’s lead producers to get feedback. Two updates were made:

Because this summer series was a special edition of Planet Money episodes, the editorial team wanted a custom landing page design for the series. As such, special HTML embeds and custom CSS overrides were utilized to achieve the landing page designs.

This was a project with a very tight turnaround time and was not traditionally scoped and planned in our sprint cycles. One unique thing about working at NPR is that news never stops and the newsroom is a dynamic stakeholder to work with. Ideas that were didn't exist a week ago, can be greenlit and approved for production in a matter of days. So, I learned how to quickly adapt to changing priorities and balance working on my original project and this smaller project.