Kedron Rhodes

Truth For Life, a nonprofit ministry reaching millions through sermons and devotionals, asked the Agathon team I was on to reimagine their digital presence. What started as a website redesign grew into a multi-year journey across two platforms, countless features, and hundreds of screens.

I led the UX and initial front-end work from the ground up—introducing user-centered design practices, building a persistent media player, and helping the organization think systemically about its digital strategy. This project stretched my skills, deepened my confidence, and taught me how to design for both consistency and delight across deeply different environments.

Situation

Reimagining a Digital Experience for Truth For Life

Truth For Life approached Agathon Group (2014) because they were unsatisfied with their current digital partner. There was some warmth in the initial introduction—our organizations had crossed paths before—but I didn’t know anyone on their team personally. That changed quickly.

Casting vision for a world-class digital experience.

We kicked off their website redesign in a Cleveland hotel conference room, where I facilitated our first UX discovery session. At the time, Truth For Life’s site mirrored their internal organizational structure more than it served their users. You had to learn how they operated just to find what you needed. It was also dated—visually and technically—and didn’t take advantage of the web’s evolving capabilities.

My goal was to help them reimagine what a more useful, user-centered experience could look like—and to earn their trust by bringing real value to their audience.

Challenge

From Department-Centric to User-First

The first hurdle wasn’t technical—it was cultural. I had to help the team shift from thinking in departments to thinking in terms of user needs. Through persona development and journey mapping, we discovered that many of their users returned daily for devotionals or syndicated sermons. That insight led to a new organizing principle: anchor the experience around a single day.

This calendar-based content model became a breakthrough moment. Instead of navigating by format or department, users could now move through a seamless, unified timeline.

But the real UX challenge was building a persistent media player—one that let users listen or watch as they navigated the site. There weren’t models for this in their space, and even major platforms like YouTube weren’t dealing with the same mix of content types. I had to define interaction patterns from scratch:

• What happens when a user starts a new media item before finishing another?
• How should we show progress across sermon series?
• Could we reflect that progress across devices?

Things got even more complex when we introduced a native mobile app—Agathon’s first. The tech stack was unfamiliar, expectations were high, and the first few months were intense. I and the team had to skill up fast while staying accountable to user needs and client expectations.

And once the mobile app launched, users began asking why the same features didn’t exist on the web. That demand drove us to develop cross-platform feature parity and persistent user profiles. From syncing bookmarks to preserving listening history across devices, I had to think through fragile states, intermittent connectivity, and long-tail user intent—all without losing simplicity in the experience.

Approach

Grounding in Personas, Prototyping with Purpose, and Bridging Platforms

Sampling of web platform interfaces.

At the outset, Truth For Life didn’t have user personas. I introduced the concept and helped the team develop them using qualitative interviews, card sorting, support team feedback, and analytics. These personas became the foundation for journey maps that stretched across web and mobile—and helped us find where journeys overlapped, diverged, or needed special care.

Laying the groundwork for a cross-platform design system.

For the persistent media player, I ran a design sprint with the client using Sharpie sketches and paper mockups. We tested these rough ideas with internal stakeholders, then moved into wireframes and low-fidelity prototypes. Before ever touching high-fidelity design, I built working HTML/CSS prototypes to test pacing, latency, and technical feasibility. That early hands-on work helped shape a tighter collaboration with our lead JavaScript developer, and together we dialed in the persistent player experience.

When we transitioned to mobile, I played a critical bridging role. The award-winning website was already mobile-optimized, which gave us a head start. But ultimately, we decided to build a native app to unlock platform-specific capabilities. I contributed heavily to both the web and React Native front-ends, which helped keep design patterns and features in sync.

Video, audio, long-form text, ecommerce, TFL has a full, modern suite of user experience demands.

Throughout, we prioritized features that could present well on both platforms—and only made platform-specific choices when the user experience or technical limitations demanded it.

Collaboration was key. I worked closely with a fantastic project manager and had frequent direct engagement with product owners and stakeholders. My role was to not just present designs, but to walk everyone through the reasoning behind them—how each interaction connected to the next, and how everything supported the larger journey. That helped us align faster and critique more effectively, both inside the team and with end users.

Outcome

A Unified Experience, a Transformed Mindset, and a Deeper UX Practice

For users, the new experience was a hit. They immediately connected with the time-based design, which let them engage content the way they already thought about it—by day. The persistent media player earned praise for its polish and performance, with users comparing it to the best in the business. On mobile, the rollout was smooth thanks to strong change management from the client. Feedback came quickly, and I helped the team move into a rhythm of releasing new features every two weeks.

Sampling of mobile platform interfaces.

The app raised the bar. Users started expecting similar functionality across platforms, which pushed us to build synced profiles and shared features between the website and mobile. What started as two platforms became a tightly integrated ecosystem.

Expanding the design system to mobile.

Truth For Life as an organization also shifted. They began anchoring their digital strategy in user expectations, not internal structure. They expanded their product management capabilities, realigned their budget planning around user value, and doubled down on listening and iterating.

For me, the project cemented a few things:

• Trust the user. Listen carefully, but solve with creativity and conviction.
• Trust the process. Sketch, test, iterate, and don’t rush high fidelity.
• Trust the collaboration. Build bridges across disciplines—and help others see the “why” behind design choices.

It also pushed me to level up my systems thinking. Managing parity across web and mobile, accounting for offline states, and designing for asynchronous user intent—all of it challenged me to think beyond individual screens and into holistic, adaptive systems.

And more than anything, it reminded me how good it feels to build something meaningful with honest, humble, talented people. I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

My Roles: UX design, information architecture, front-end development

Team: 1 UX/UI designer, 2 front-end developer, 2 back-end developer, 1 project manager

Tools: User research, usability testing, HTML/CSS/JS, design systems, component libraries, Photoshop, Illustrator, Sketch