Omroep WNL
A broadcaster that publishes like a newsroom.
A newsroom publishes hundreds of times a week, and every one of those publishes has to be fast. For Omroep WNL, a Dutch public broadcaster with an outspoken editorial profile and a large, loyal audience, the old website had become the bottleneck. At Super Interactive I led the redesign that turned a traditional broadcast site into a publishing platform: quicker, structured for daily output, and built for the younger audience the broadcaster wants to reach. WNL’s own technical team was in the room throughout.
Role
Design Lead, at Super Interactive
launch
2024
Scope
Strategy, UX/UI, Design System
Scale
4 content types · Daily publishing · Live video
Live
The Challenge
Years of running had left the old site with the kind of problems long-running platforms collect, while the editorial ambition kept moving: daily news, video segments, opinion, live broadcast, shorts, and a wish for far more interaction with a rejuvenating audience. Two masters had to be served at once: an editorial team publishing at newsroom speed, and readers arriving in volumes heavy enough to be hard on the servers.
The Design
One platform, four kinds of story.
News articles, video segments, opinion pieces and programmes each behave differently, and readers move between them constantly. Each content type gets its own logic (article structure, sticky players, topic navigation, visual categorisation) inside one coherent system, so switching formats never feels like switching sites.
Homepage: news, program tags and shorts on one page.
Editors build without developers.
Together with WNL’s developers we designed custom content blocks in Statamic that let the editorial team compose structured stories on their own. No dev ticket for a new article format, no template drift. This is where the project paid for itself: a publishing platform is only as fast as its slowest publish.
An article as the editors compose it: every part is a block.
An interaction layer for a younger audience.
Polls, comments, emoji reactions: the features that pull a broadcast audience into a conversation. It was the hardest part of the build by some distance, and the part the platform needed most. WNL’s growth strategy leans on shorts and direct engagement, and a site you only read is a site you leave.
Reactions, comments and polls in articles for engagement.
Where it stands now
Live since 2024, publishing daily, holding under real traffic.
The platform runs smoothly under heavy load and carries WNL’s full editorial output: news, opinion, live video and shorts.
Contact
Want to ship products together?
I'm looking for a team where design doesn't stop at handoff. If that sounds like yours, I'd like to hear about it.
Send me a message at martijnruitenbeek@gmail.com
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