Accessible and engaging platforms for the Flemish audience
VRT is Flanders' public broadcaster and one of Belgium's most recognised media brands, reaching millions weekly across television, radio and digital. Its portfolio includes VRT MAX, an on-demand platform for series, docs and podcasts, VRT NWS for news, and Sporza, the platform Belgians turn to for football, alongside radio brands like Radioplus and Studio Brussel. Since 2022, Craftzing has helped VRT bring that portfolio to a broad, digitally fluent audience.
The challenge: creating content and platforms that truly work for everyone
As a public broadcaster, VRT exists to inform, entertain and connect the whole of Flanders. That means its platforms cannot afford to work well for only part of that audience. VRT’s mandate pushes them to constantly raise the bar on accessibility, user-friendliness and relevance across VRT MAX, VRT NWS and Sporza alike, whether that means integrating a major cultural moment like “De Warmste Week” or the Olympics into its platforms, weaving new formats like podcasts into VRT MAX, or simply making existing pages clearer and easier to use.
Nowhere did that mandate matter more than in 2024, a year with both European, federal and regional elections in June and local elections in October. As a public broadcaster, VRT NWS carries a particular responsibility at crucial moments like these. That responsibility turned into a clear design question which made VRT turn to our Craftzing expert with a clear task: come up with a solution to deliver news about an event this important in a way that is understandable and engaging for a broad audience that ranges from lifelong voters to teenagers casting a ballot for the very first time.
The solution: KIES24, a clear, consistent way to follow an election that never really stopped
The answer was KIES24, an environment that allowed people to follow election content and results in the same clear, consistent way across the VRT NWS website, app and, at the editorial team's request, on television as well.
Because the June and October elections were mapped as one continuous story rather than two separate news moments, VRT NWS could guide its audience through months of coverage using one recognisable structure instead of building it twice.
For first-time voters specifically, the youth-focused nws.nws.nws platform launched in time for the KIESfestival with its own distinct look built on the same underlying design system. The platform was completed with (1) a youth-oriented voting test that scored 9 out of 10 with users for its usefulness and appeal, and (2) a website that teachers used in class to zoom in on the topic.
Young users even rated the platform itself 8.5 out of 10 for attractiveness, a strong result for an audience that is famously hard to win over.
The approach: an embedded team turning a content strategy into a mobile-first design
Craftzing's service, UX and UI designers worked as an integral part of VRT's own digital teams, embedded alongside various departments rather than delivering from the outside.
VRT NWS's editorial team first mapped every piece of election content from June to October across its touchpoints, and that content strategy became the brief the Craftzing design team turned into a validated concept through an initial round of user testing and several rounds of iteration.
Because more than half of VRT NWS's audience uses the app and roughly 80 percent of website visitors browse on a smartphone, the team designed results and data visualisations mobile-first from the outset. In doing so, the platform moved away from traditional comparison charts toward interactive elements such as zoom and filtering, features that keep dense election data legible on a small screen without losing the bigger picture.
That same embedded way of working carried through to nws.nws.nws. Rather than building a full app, the team deliberately chose a website as a fast, testable minimum viable product, informed by how young people actually behave around app downloads. Because VRT NWS already had a robust design system, the team could give nws.nws.nws a completely distinct, more playful visual identity, new icons, a new thumbnail view, more colour, simply by adjusting the system's foundational layers, while keeping every underlying component the same. That reuse is what let the team hit the KIESfestival deadline, test iterations quickly with stakeholders, and free the editorial team to focus on filling the platform with the information young voters actually needed.
