Role
Product design
User Research
Product strategy
Year
2022
Podcast streaming app that aims to help listeners find the episodes they want more quickly whilst also offering them more of a sense of community.
Overview
Listening to podcasts on streaming apps can feel isolated and passive. Many people prefer to listen on social media platforms over dedicated podcast ecosystems because they offer a sense of community and better search mechanisms.
Adding community-centred features to podcast streaming platforms could help transform the listening experience from a lonesome one to an immersive and interactive one, boosting app usage and engagement and drawing in users that consume audio content on alternative platforms.
Understanding what people want
Survey results indicated that 54% of respondents wish it were easier to find specific podcast episodes, and 59% would like to be able to interact more with podcasts.
After speaking directly to podcast listeners, some clear themes emerged from interviews:
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The making of Heard
I mapped the current user journey listening to a podcast on an existing streaming platform from the data collected. From here, I identified stages that could be improved to help foster a more interactive community experience and enable people to find individual podcast episodes more quickly.
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Iterations
After testing an early prototype with a handful of people, when searching for individual episodes, it was suggested that users needed the option to sort results in addition to keyword searching. Be it by views, rating, recency and even duration to narrow down a search. I redesigned the flow based on these insights.
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Outcome
At the end of the three-week sprint, I created a high-fidelity clickable prototype for Heard.
Search within a show
Individual podcasts are searchable by guest names, keywords and topics with new sorting filters such as "most listened to.”
Building community through interactivity
Comment on episodes, reply to other users and sort comments by likes, time-stamps or recency.
Better app-wide search
Filtering options added along with the ability to toggle between browsing shows or episodes in search results.
Moving forward
Podcast apps need to be more accessible
Leading podcast apps offer limited or no access to podcast transcripts. As a result, millions of people who suffer from disabling hearing loss can’t access an ever-growing library of ideas and conversations available exclusively in audio format. Designing for transcript integration in podcasts is something I would have liked to have explored with Heard, given more time.
