Radio Times' TV listings

Giving customers accurate TV Listings for their region

The TV listings feature receives the most weekly active engagement and is key to subscriber retention. When I designed the MVP, we knew we'd have to iterate fast and develop other important features that support viewing preferences.

Problem

Voice of the customer

After launching the TV listings feature in the Radio Times app, users were highlighting friction due to the lack of regional listings.

All customers are seeing the same TV Listings channels and information, when they expect to see regional-specific to where they are in the UK or Ireland.

Research

What the survey told us

48% of customers have set their region before, supporting the need for this feature and a feature adoption goal to aim for.

01

Of those who set their region, 54% did to get correct listings and 26% for travel use cases

03

Users near regional borders frequently receive stronger signals from a neighbouring region and actively override their location — a real edge case requiring a manual fallback.

02

Automatic location region setting is the preferred method and is expected

04

A meaningful subset of users prefer not to share location data, making a manual selection path essential — not optional.

01

Of those who set their region, 54% did to get correct listings and 26% for travel use cases

02

Automatic location region setting is the preferred method and is expected

03

Users near regional borders frequently receive stronger signals from a neighbouring region and actively override their location — a real edge case requiring a manual fallback.

04

A meaningful subset of users prefer not to share location data, making a manual selection path essential — not optional.

Key insights

The research surfaced that the majority of customers expect to set their region automatically through automatic location detection, and raise the need for manual method for border cases, when travelling, and privacy-conscious users — a user need I wasn't expecting.

Image showing research verbatim

Image showing research verbatim

Solution

In three-parts

01

Geo-tracking, to make region-setting effortless and fast, we implemented geo-tracking using native Location Services functionality.

02

Manual region selection for border cases, privacy-conscious users, and travellers who want a fixed override

03

Modal prompt on users' first session to ensure full adoption of the feature.

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Testing

Product usability

I usability tested the product to ensure both core flows and supporting flows were intuaitive and without friction, allowing us to proceed with our phased-rollout of this listing enhancement.

Results

We’ve seen strong feature adoption, and an expected preference towards location detection method

42%

of customers have now set their region

85%

chose automatic location detection

29%

used manual selection

Note: the 85%/29% split sums above 100%, suggesting a subset of users tried both methods — consistent with border-region behaviour identified in research.