Bringing the party online

FG USA

FG USA is the american counterpart of FG DJ France, which is the first House music radio station in Paris, France, since 1981. As innovative broadcasters, they have launched international DJs such as David Guetta, Benny Benassi, Bob Sinclar and Martin Solveig. Promoting their radio across the United States, they reached out to me to craft an experience to translate their experience of clubbing into a digital form.

Such as many of their competitors, Radio FG USA had a CMS-designed blog and a Flash-based radio (HTML5 was just released couple of months before). This status quo kept them from establishing themselves as the pioneer of their industry.

Over the course of a few months I closely collaborated with the founders, to transition their website to a dynamic, live, and social party platform. As a Full Stack Art Director, I managed a UX Engineer to redesign the experience around the party goers, and performed a quick content audit of the current site to determine areas of focus. From there, I put together some rough concept sketches and itemized lists of my objectives then jumped right into design sprints. The result is an innovative and edgy website, featuring horizontal drill-down page navigation, and the very first HTML5 live radio of its kind.

Moodboard & visual tonality

The new website

Using card sorting to restructure the iA, we designed a one-window drilldown to help the users focusing on one thing at a time. FG USA design is inspired by the compelling art of party flyers: high contrast, flashy colors, grunge background, dynamic shapes, glassy borders, and patterned separators.

Cutting-egde

FG USA requested to cut down the approval time of app platforms. We strategically advised to take advantage of the brand new HTML5 Audio API, which was already implemented by major browsers, but not broadly used yet. I integrally designed and coded the very 1st live broadcast HTML5 radio, on par with an XML Parser to retrieve artists information from servers. A year after, the very same script was deployed across all FG websites French counterparts.

Results

250% increase in party bookings,
10k Twitter followers in three months