Bauer Media
Building a Unified Web Listening Platform for Bauer Media
Responsive Web Application
Since January 2025, I've led the UX and UI design of Bauer Media Audio's new web experience, part of Rayo, Bauer's next generation audio platform.
My role involves mentoring other product designers, shaping user research direction, facilitating concept ideation workshops, aligning stakeholders across nine European business units, and overseeing the creation of a modular design system to unify the experience across web and mobile.
The new Rayo Web experience is currently in internal beta and will launch across 9 Bauer territories in Q1 2026.- Role
- Senior Product Designer️
- Year
- 2025 – Present
- Disciplines
- Design mentorship, workshop facilitation, design systems, UX research, UX design, UI design, high-fidelity prototyping, interaction design
Overview
About Rayo
Rayo is Bauer Media Audio's first and third party listening platform, designed to unify live radio, on-demand shows, and podcasts under one brand. It first launched as a mobile app in the UK in June 2024, with plans to scale across all nine Bauer business units under different localised brand names by 2026.
The web platform plays a crucial role in this rollout, serving as Bauer's most visited digital surface and acting as a bridge between casual listeners, subscribers, and on-demand audiences.
The web platform plays a crucial role in this rollout, serving as Bauer's most visited digital surface and acting as a bridge between casual listeners, subscribers, and on-demand audiences.
Overview
Why redesign Bauer's existing Web experience?
Before Rayo, Bauer's digital ecosystem relied on legacy websites such as Planet Radio, each built independently by different business units. These sites:
Our goal was to design a modern, modular, and personalised web platform that could support Bauer's future audio ambitions and scale internationally.
- Offered little to no personalisation beyond favouriting stations
- Operated on incompatible legacy codebases, making cross-platform parity impossible
- Presented a linear and outdated listening experience that lagged behind the mobile app by nearly two years
Our goal was to design a modern, modular, and personalised web platform that could support Bauer's future audio ambitions and scale internationally.
Design Discovery
Challenges
- Tech-led starting point: The development team had previously operated without dedicated design input, making UX integration and collaboration a significant cultural shift.
- Fragmented architecture: Each Bauer territory (UK, Ireland, Slovakia, and others) maintained its own codebase, creating long-term maintenance challenges.
- Balancing global and local needs: Rayo needed to unify the listening experience while allowing each business unit to maintain its own commercial priorities, such as advertising, competitions, and news.
- Legacy dependencies: The team needed to support the existing Planet Radio reskin while designing the new Rayo Web platform in parallel.
To allow the UK launch of Rayo to have a short term web presence, we rebranded Planet Radio to Rayo until the new web experience was available.
Opportunities
- Build a unified, modern codebase with a scalable, component-based design system.
- Align web and mobile experiences through consistent design principles and shared components.
- Expand audience reach and listening time through improved discovery, personalisation, and cross-brand navigation.
- Modernise Bauer's design and development practices through research-led, iterative UX processes.
Who We're Designing For
Previous research conducted during the Alpha phase with agency Ustwo identified three primary Bauer web user types:
- Listeners: Radio and on-demand audio consumers (the core focus for phase one)
- Readers: Users who visit for articles, news, or editorial content
- Compers: Users primarily motivated by competitions or giveaways
Design Approach
Collaborative Workshops
We began with in-person ideation workshops that brought together product managers, developers, and designers. Using creative matrix sketching and "How Might We" framing, we explored opportunities to improve:
- The live listening experience
- Personalisation and onboarding
- Multi-station navigation
- Cross-content discovery
Information Architecture
The new IA was built around the listening pillar. While the majority of the new experience would leverage the updated codebase, some legacy systems needed to remain in place until they could be replaced in future iterations.
The IA helped highlight technical constraints that might affect user journeys and experience. As part of a wider design and research initiative, artifacts such as IA diagrams, user flows, and site maps helped communicate these dependencies to developers, clarifying scope and priorities.
The IA helped highlight technical constraints that might affect user journeys and experience. As part of a wider design and research initiative, artifacts such as IA diagrams, user flows, and site maps helped communicate these dependencies to developers, clarifying scope and priorities.
User Research and Testing
We conducted moderated and unmoderated usability tests with listeners across Bauer's European business units to validate:
- The new onboarding and personalisation flows
- The cross-brand navigation model
- Appetite for exploring other verticals such as news or competitions
- Users valued personalisation and quick access to favourite stations.
- The new Rayo interface felt more modern and intuitive, especially the simplified player.
- Participants appreciated Bauer's unified approach, describing it as "one place for everything I listen to."
Design Leadership
Representing design led thinking in the web team
As the most senior individual contributor on the project, I introduced several new practices and processes:
- Mentorship: Guided two product designers through design system creation, UX research synthesis, and stakeholder communication.
- Design surgeries: Regular feedback sessions to elevate visual consistency and usability.
- Cross-functional collaboration: Represented design in "three amigos" meetings between Product, Development, and Design, ensuring design intent was carried through to implementation.
- Upskilling and knowledge sharing: Introduced advanced design system techniques to the design team, including Figma Variables, MCP Server integrations, and prototyping workflows using Cursor and AI-assisted tools.
AI and Prototype Innovation
AI UX copywriting assistant
As we didn't have a dedicated UX copywriter on the team, I collaborated with another designer to develop a UX copywriting assistant that generates and refines copy aligned with Rayo's tone of voice, used across flows and components.
High-fidelity, AI-enhanced prototypes
More recently, I’ve been replacing Figma prototypes with high-fidelity, AI-enhanced prototypes that integrate Figma’s MCP Server logic, enabling faster and more realistic user testing.
Implementation
Design System Impact
The Rayo Web design system is modular and scalable, designed to serve all nine Bauer business units.
It features:
It features:
- Shared global assets for iconography, colour tokens, and imagery
- Platform-specific patterns for buttons, cards, and media players
- Responsive documentation detailing component states and breakpoints
- A comprehensive library of components in Storybook, improving visibility, QA, and cross-team adoption
Impact
The new Rayo Web experience is currently in internal beta, with rollout planned across all Bauer territories in 2026.
Even in pilot testing, early results show:
Even in pilot testing, early results show:
- Increased engagement with live and on-demand content
- Faster page load performance
- Positive user sentiment toward the unified experience
Summary
Rayo Web marks a pivotal step in Bauer Media Audio’s digital transformation, modernising its web ecosystem, embedding user-centred design into a previously tech-led team, and creating a scalable framework for cross-market rollout.
By uniting Bauer’s brands and experiences under one design-led platform, Rayo Web lays the foundation for the next decade of audio experiences, where personalisation, simplicity, and consistency drive listening growth across Europe.
By uniting Bauer’s brands and experiences under one design-led platform, Rayo Web lays the foundation for the next decade of audio experiences, where personalisation, simplicity, and consistency drive listening growth across Europe.
Niall Quinn 2025