When the pandemic quarantine began back around April 2020, I would listen to audiobooks and podcasts during walks and at home because I wasn't able to go out and chat with friends as easily as I could before. I was using the Apple Podcast at the time and I wasn't quite satisfied with how confusing the app was to navigate and operate. From that experience, I was curious to find out how other people viewed podcasts and wanted to find out more about how podcast fit into their life. So, I dove into a design project with my design colleague to uncover ways in which we could improve the Apple podcast app.
Disclaimer: This is a personal project to develop my own skills and is not affiliated with Apple.
The goal was to solidify the user experience of the mobile Apple Podcast app to recapture and retain both new podcast listeners and committed podcast listeners, while staying consistent with the Human Interface Guideline.
To gain an overview perspective of the the podcasting industry, I did online research for reputable podcasting studies.
The majority of monthly podcast listeners are younger folks aged 12-34. It can also be seen that across all age groups, the size of monthly podcast listeners are growing year over year.
Podcast listeners want to be able to get to the meat of the podcast content or hooked in within the first 15 minutes. Additionally, the most popular podcast app is currently Spotify as the once market leader, Apple, loses its title.
Based on the US population, podcast listenership has been growing, specifically with the younger generation. People are becoming increasing more familiar with the concept of podcasts and listenership is growing year over year.
Sources: The Podcast Host and Edison Research and Statista
I conducted 15 user interviews, ranging from casual to daily podcast listeners to understand the qualitative story behind podcast listeners. Afterwards, I arranged the insights and findings to uncover patterns in user responses.
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- Podcast listeners multitask when listening to podcast as a way to feel productive.
- Content from podcasts are seen as more informative and educational.
- Podcasts as an audio media creates a calming, relaxing, and conversational ambience that can be entertaining and present thought provoking topics or ideas for discussion.
- It is convenient and easy for people to fit in podcasts into parts of their routines that are otherwise mundane or boring.
Apple Podcast had the all the basics down, but it didn't go above and beyond for podcast listeners. The biggest competitive advantage that Apple Podcast had over other platforms was that it was pre-installed on all iPhones and thus served as a convenient starter podcast app. However, Spotify was able to provide more of a cohesive all-in-one platform for both music and podcast, which appealed to many of our users during our user research.
After getting a stronger sense of what podcast listeners valued and comparing what other podcasting apps on market were up to, Apple Podcasts had the basic features of a podcast player down. However, other podcast apps had a competitive edge when it came to offering unique features that mattered to devoted podcast listeners.
Based on the insights gained from market research, user interviews, and competitive analysis we created a list of HMW statements to help spark ideas for ways a podcasting app could solve for specific podcast listeners' needs.
We individually brainstormed possible solutions to these HMW statements and then reconvened to discuss our ideas. After pooling our ideas together, we prioritized and decided to improve features for the: Library, Podcast Player, Listen Now, and Episode Listings within Apple Podcast.
I was responsible for the user flows related to the Library and Podcast Player, while Thang was in charge of Listen Now and Episode Listings. We each had ownership over 2 main screen flows, but would continue to collaborate, critique, and provide feedback to one another's work.
The Shows and Episodes pages lump all the content into one long list that users need to tediously scroll through. Shows may not be as glaring of issue as most users will have around 10 or fewer shows. However, episodes can easily become an unfiltered pile of episodes if the auto-add feature is turned on for a podcast show (A single podcast show can frequently contain 100+ episodes).
Sorting the list only marginally alleviates the issue by organizing the list, but the underlying issue is the way in which content is organized. There aren’t enough subcategories to partition the amount of podcast content that a podcast enthusiast may have.
The “Recently Updated” section rearranges the podcast ordering based on which podcast just released new content. This can can be disorienting for people as having a visually inconsistent “Library” home page requires people to refamiliarize themselves with what is being presented on screen.
I’d argue that the “Recently Updated” section is better suited for the “Listen Now” tab. The focus of “Listen Now” is reducing the barrier to entry so listeners can easily have a podcast episode up and running, while the “Library” acts as the structured, central hub for saved podcast content. Since the “Recently Updated” section entices listeners with newly updated podcast episodes and fluctuates with dynamic content, it more effectively supports the goal of “Listen Now” rather than goal of “Library”.
Currently, Apple Podcast has a feature that allows people to create stations, which automatically adds new podcast episodes to the playlist when Podcasts are updated. However, the term “stations” is not commonly used amongst podcasting the and is more reminiscent of radio stations. With the rising popularity of Spotify, podcasting platforms are more frequently associated with music rather than radio content. As a result, this feature remains underutilized due to poor discoverability and a steeper learning curve for what should be self-explanatory and unambiguous.
Assessing the interactive controls of the podcast player, there are some tweaks to usability and design that would help elevate the app to a more user-friendly podcast player.
On the podcast player interface, people were often unaware that the podcast player even contained additional features (Sleep Timer, Episode Notes, Chapters, and Playing Next), because the app doesn’t provide a clear visual signifier for features that are hidden completely below the phone’s fold. These feature would be greatly appreciated by podcast listeners given that they are discovered in the first place.
The library needed to provide quick and convenient access to people's favorite podcasting content. I wanted it the podcasting shows and episodes to be structured so that people could reliably and consistent find their podcast content.
With the podcast player I was looking for ways to make simple quality of life improvements within the media control buttons. I was also tinkering with the navigational structure of the podcast player to help solve the issue of having hidden podcast feature below the phone's fold.
With initial sketch concepts created, I created high fidelity prototypes so that I could refine them further.
I conducted 8 remote moderated usability tests refining initial high fidelity mock ups.
With the first iteration of the library, it was confusing for people to understand what collections were for. My first attempt was to pair Collections next to Playlists to convey that Playlists and Collections were a grouping of specific content, episodes and shows respectively. However, validation from usability tests revealed that users understood that collections were a grouping of content, but it was difficult to infer what collections were a grouping of. So, collections should be grouped with shows to allow users to quickly associate collections as a grouping of shows.
With the first iteration, I wanted user feedback and opinion on the new swipe navigational system. The use of the visual page indicator would help guide users to useful features to the right and left of the podcast. Based on feedback, once people had done the page swipe once, they were aware of what content was available. Useful content such as episode descriptions and chapters were easily found but tucked away when not needed. They also liked the accessibility to customize playback settings, especially the skip buttons intervals.
I aimed to reprioritize the Library so that the shows and episodes were simple to understand and intuitive to navigate. The underlying information architecture creates a distinction between Episodes and Followed Shows, the two core content housed under library. To accomodate for flexible categorization of podcast content, users can group episodes to create playlists and group shows to create collections.
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The main priorities with the tweaks made to podcast player were to:
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This design project was completed with a fellow design friend of mine during the quarantine lockdown. It was fully remote design work, so I that meant adapting and learning how to conduct user interviews, brainstorming sessions, prototype usability tests, and more through online zoom calls. Pre planning the order and structure that we were presenting our information helped online user interviews and tests run smoother with less hiccups.
Following the Apple Human Interface Guideline allowed us to create on brand consistent UI designs. While there wasn't as much creativity in terms of the UI design, it freed us up to really focus on the UX design of Apple Podcast.
Apple announced a future Apple Podcast update that would include podcast subscriptions (a paid premium service). These subscription services would allow listeners pay for exclusive podcast content from their favorite podcasters. There is also a new feature called channels, which are curated groups of shows. Many more podcast app features are being changed in iOS 14.5. All this being said, I am excited to see how Apple Podcast evolves and changes and will see how my design could learn a thing or two from the new update. Click here for the news article.
There are other platforms and device that I could design for such as for desktop, iPad, Apple Watch, widgets, and website. Each would have their unique design constraints and would require an altered user interface and functionality.
