OVERVIEW

Reimagining podcast discovery for listeners and creators

Spotify has been my go-to music app since middle school. I recently started using Spotify for podcasts as well, but I found myself struggling to find something to listen to. In order to improve my design skills, I decided to explore this problem further in an independent case study.

Timeline

Fall 2020 — 2 months

Team

Myself!

ROLE

Product Strategy, User Research, Interaction Design, UX Design

CHALLENGE

In 2019, Spotify announced its plans to become an audio-first company, expanding beyond music to podcasts. There are now over 2 million podcasts on Spotify.

How can we help listeners discover podcasts on Spotify and confidently decide what to listen to?

 
SOLUTION OVERVIEW

Introducing Podcast Trailers: a reimagined, audio-first approach to podcast discovery that helps people search less and listen more

 
 

Discover podcasts effortlessly

Find new shows right on the home page. You’re shown a personalized series of podcasts that match your interests.

Preview before you commit

Explore new shows on the podcast page.

Engage with content

Animated captions make it easy to understand a podcast.

Podcast creators who don’t create trailers will have a video made for them with content from their first episode.

Start listening right away

Trailers take you right to the podcast page so you can immediately start listening.

Share your podcast interests

60% of people discover podcasts through social media.

Trailers can be posted on social media stories and messaged to friends so you can share and find recommendations through other platforms. 

SECONDARY RESEARCH

Diving into the process

Although I’m familiar with Spotify as a user, I conducted secondary research to understand the podcast industry and align myself with Spotify’s business goals.

Two findings stuck out to me:

1.

Rookie listeners ⌿ Veteran listeners

New, “rookie” listeners are younger and more likely to use Spotify. I decided to focus on making it easier for this growing demographic of listeners to get into podcasts.

2.

Spotify is investing in tools to help small creators make podcasts

Tools such as Anchor are lowering the barrier to podcast creation. I realized that it was important to understand more about creators’ pain points in order to create a solution that would benefit everyone involved.

 
USER RESEARCH

I interviewed 6 people with varying levels of familiarity with podcasts to learn about their experiences and pain points.

The interviews helped validate my hypothesis that podcast discovery was difficult.

Pain point 1.

Imagery and descriptions are not enough to help people get a sense of if they will like a podcast

Pain point 2.

Discovering podcasts requires more time and effort than music

I also identified two types of behaviors related to podcast discovery that I would need to account for:

PODCASTER RESEARCH

In order to understand podcasters’ perspectives, I did more secondary research and spoke with a small creator in order to understand their experience.

Pain point

It is difficult for creators without an existing following to be discovered organically

Brainstorming IDEAS

Based on research insights, I sketched initial explorations to test out different ideas

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RATIONALIZING DESIGN DECISIONS

After considering the effort and impact of these ideas, I decided to focus on improving the existing podcast trailers feature

Here’s what the current feature looks like:

 

I’ve always admired Spotify’s ability to blend visuals and sound to create an immersive listening experience, and I gained inspiration for this idea by learning about current Spotify and podcast features

I thought that adding captions to trailers would be a great visual element to increase engagement, promote accessibility, and help smaller creators promote their shows. 

USER FLOW

Thinking back to my research findings, I decided to make two new entry points for trailers to address the needs of the two discovery behaviors I identified during interviews

DESIGN EXPLORATIONS

I used insights from research to understand how I should design trailers on the home and podcast screen:

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ITERATIONS

After I began prototyping in high fidelity, I reached out to 5 people I initially interviewed to test my hypothesis that adding captions to trailers would create a more engaging, effortless podcast discovery experience

Overall, people responded positively to the concept and believed it would make it easier to find new podcasts

“This would make it a lot quicker to understand if I will like a show … I would definitely use it”

Iterations focused on creating a distinct design pattern for trailers and revising copy:

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FINAL DESIGN
reflection

Since this case study is now two years old, it was interesting looking back on it and thinking about what I would do differently now

  1. Determine potential metrics for success before designing

  2. Get feedback from people sooner

  3. Spend more time brainstorming ideas

learnings

Working on this project gave me a much more thorough understanding of the entire design process. I learned to:

1. Consider multiple viewpoints

This project gave me the chance to create a concept that would address the needs of listeners, podcasters, as well as Spotify. Examining a problem from multiple lenses helped me understand the importance of creating intentional design decisions for everyone in the podcast ecosystem.

2. Narrow focus to create a meaningful solution

In the ideation phase, I found myself struggling to decide which direction to go in. In the end, I learned to refer to research to navigate indecisiveness.

Moving forward, I want to explore:

2. The feasibility of my solution

Since I don’t work at Spotify, I’m missing lots of business and development context. I want to understand more about the technical challenges that would exist if this solution was to actually be implemented.

1. Trailers from a podcaster’s POV

What’s the best way to help podcasters’ create a trailer?