Bringing Live Radio to the Home Screen: Designing Global Player’s Interactive iOS Widget
When Apple rolled out iOS 17 with interactive widgets, I saw an opportunity. What if Global Player listeners could tune into their favourite station instantly—without ever opening the app?
A few Hack Time Fridays later, I had some early concepts. What started as a personal exploration quickly gained traction, and before I knew it, I was working with our iOS engineers to bring it to life.
This is the story of how we turned a small idea into a fully functional, interactive home screen widget—giving users faster, easier access to live radio with just one tap.
Role: Lead UX Designer
Team: Product, UX, Engineering, Stakeholders
Duration: 3 months
Key Focus Areas: Designing for new and unfamiliar iOS functionalities.
Too Many Taps, Too Much Scrolling
Live radio is the heart of Global Player. It’s the reason so many of our users open the app in the first place. But getting to a station wasn’t as seamless as it should be.
🔍 Too much scrolling
Users were sifting through stations they didn’t care about just to find the one they actually wanted. I surveyed over 4,000 Global Player users. 70% of participants confirmed they mostly listen to just one station — which (thankfully!) aligned with our quantitative behavioural study tracking user listening patterns.
📻 Too many taps
It was taking multiple steps just to start listening. Of the 30% of users who switch between multiple stations, we found that 60% rely on our live radio selector to find something to listen to. That would be fine if it were the only way to access live radio, but the steady stream of feedback we received suggested frustration: users just wanted to find their station faster. So, we introduced a “My Favourite Live Radio” widget on the home screen for one-tap access. But something still wasn’t clicking.
Then came iOS 17’s interactive widget update, introducing live play/pause controls and dynamic metadata support. Apple had just handed us the perfect opportunity to bring instant listening to the home screen—reducing friction and making the listening experience as effortless as possible.
From Idea to Concept during Hack Time Fridays
I first started playing with this idea during one of my Hack Time Friday sessions—a little window of time we carve out for self-led projects. With iOS 17’s new interactive states, widgets could now support play/pause functionality and dynamic metadata updates—a game-changer for live radio.
I jumped into Figma’s iOS 17 UI Kit, set up a new file, and started sketching out different widget variations:
Live Radio Widget: One-tap play for a favourite station.
Catch-Up & Podcasts: Recently played shows for on-demand listening.
Continue Listening: Resume unfinished content directly from the home screen.
After a couple of iterations, I shared the concepts in our general Slack channel, mainly just to spark conversation and see if anyone had thoughts. I wasn’t expecting much, but then our Director of Product chimed in. He loved the concept and asked me to explore it further. That’s when things got real.
Building It for Real: Collabing with devs & defining the MVP
With the green light to prototype this properly, I looped in two of my squadmates: Jack (Senior iOS Developer) & Adam (Lead iOS Developer) – Both super experienced with Apple frameworks, and equally eager to get their hands on iOS 17’s new features.
Sam, our Jr. Product Owner, was taking on her first public-facing project, meaning we had her full attention to scope this properly.
We quickly set out to:
Refine the designs – Ensuring they fit Apple’s widget constraints while keeping things on-brand.
Define the MVP – Prioritising Live Radio playback before expanding into other content types.
Understand technical limitations – iOS widgets don’t support full audio playback, so we needed a seamless handoff to the app.
The most exciting part was that everyone was genuinely excited about this. It’s not every day you get to experiment with brand-new OS features while shipping something users will actually love.
Adapting to a growing list of requirements
Designing for multiple brands
With Global's diverse ecosystem of stations, my goal was to create brand-specific prototypes for each station's widget, helping me secure final approvals on the UI by showcasing its scalability.
Introducing Widget States
The company aimed to facilitate user reminders for signups or logins through the widget. We also needed to support error messaging, and provide users with an onboarding process that instructs them how to set up their Home Screen widgets.
Supporting Standby and Night Modes
User Journeys Maps with Event Tracking
Key Design Functionalities
✅ Live, dynamic radio information – Presenter images update in real-time as new shows go live.
✅ Play/Pause/Stop functionality – No need to open the app to start listening.
✅ 2 sizes to choose from – Each with a unified value prop.
✅ Branded for all 34 Global stations – Each with unique colours and logos.
✅ Multiple widget configurations – Users can pin different stations to their home screen.
✅ Sign-up/Login requirement – Business requirement to encourage user retention.
✅ Seamless audio syncing – Keeps track of what’s playing between the widget and app.
The Impact: Adoption, Learnings & Next Steps
Adoption Rate: Right now, ±1% of Daily Active iOS users (Which is ± 7000 users a day!) listen to live radio from the widget. Not quite the vanity metric, but…
Engagement Rate: These users use the widget on avg. 2x per day —confirming that for frequent listeners, the widget is a game-changer, and has become an integral part of their daily routine.
I also designed the widget's campaign assets, including this App Store Event!
Key Learnings & Reflections
As always, each project is an opportunity to learn and refine. Here’s what stood out to me:
💡 Onboarding Matters – We relied on in-app messaging & EDS campaigns, but adoption remained low. More hands-on feature onboarding could have made a bigger difference.
📱 Android Next? – Since launch, a few Android developers have expressed interest in bringing widgets to their platform, where widget functionality has existed for far longer than iOS.
🔍 Working with Constraints – Apple’s widget framework is super strict, forcing us to think creatively about what we could actually achieve.
🚀 It Started as a Fun Idea… And Became Something Real – This entire feature started as a random Hack Time Friday experiment, and now thousands of people are using it daily to listen to live radio.
Final Thoughts
This was one of those dream projects—a mix of exploration, collaboration, and real-world impact. I got to play with brand-new iOS features, collaborate with some incredibly sharp engineers, and bring something to life that makes listening to radio just that little bit easier.
If nothing else, this project is a reminder that the best ideas don’t always come from a roadmap. Sometimes, they start with curiosity, a bit of hack time, and a Slack message that just happens to catch the right person’s eye.