The convergence between personality and podcasts. The small but ambitious team at Auby wanted to redefine podcast discovery from the ground up. I took ownership in designing the product experience and branding that represents why Auby is unique in its own right
Disclaimer: All thoughts and opinions expressed in this case study are my own. Current direction and product from Auby may have changed since the end of my internship
As part of my final co-op placement, it was a change of pace working in a startup wearing many hats. At the time there was only a data scientist, PM and product designer (me) running the whole show while eventually other team members were hired.
I was responsible for everything product related: user research, wireframing, prototypes, branding and user testing.
With such a small team it was a luxury working directly with the PM, developers and graphic designer to iteratively improve upon the design to bring the product vision to life.
For many new podcast listeners, they have difficulties finding the right podcast episodes to listen to. Apps such as Apple podcast and Spotify overwhelm new listeners with hundreds of generic categories making it increasingly difficult to make a decision
Users end up feeling frustrated and impatient, constantly searching for new content. This results in the same default popular shows to be circulated while smaller channels receive less exposure.
Popular podcast app discover sections, it does the job but it’s just too generic
Data is key. In today’s day and age users are skeptical of the information collected so we need to be transparent of our intentions. The more information the better the results but the question is, what type of information do we really need?
We need to establish a balance between collecting enough information to make initial recommendations and ensuring a frictionless onboarding process.
How can we balance the UX design of Auby to accommodate both new users to podcasts and experienced power users to use our platform?
The product vision is for Auby to become a dynamic and evolving system. We need to figure out a way for users to control their preferences and adapt to a user’s ever changing listening habits.
Something worse than a poorly designed app is a frustrating onboarding process. A seamless onboarding is key to convert new users and minimize drop-off.
How can we keep the user coming back to using Auby through daily actions? Gamification? In-app rewards? Free money?
Due to COVID-19 conducting in person interviews was not an option. Luckily we had access to a service called Feedback Loop, an agile research platform for rapid consumer feedback.
The purpose of the user survey was to get better insights on where podcasts might fit in and what discouraged users from listening for non-podcast users. We also wanted to get a better understanding of the background and the mindset experienced podcast users went through when first discovering their love for podcasts.
We analyzed 408 user survey responses targeted at college educated individuals aged between 18-54 for a period of 1 week. Below are the highlights from an affinity diagramming session done on Miro.
Affinity diagramming highlights from Miro
Based on the small sample size research collected above, I developed two generalized proto-personas to better empathize with who exactly I was designing for.
Two fictional research backed proto-personas
Weeks of user research, competitive analysis and preliminary user podcast experience allowed the team to hone in on key features to prioritize. Building out a 2x2 feature matrix allowed PM, Engineering and design to compromise on a scalable product roadmap for the future.
2x2 feature prioritization matrix
After some research into other personalized experience apps I began sketching my ideas and variations of the user flow
Rough notebook sketches of my first iteration wireframes
After numerous rounds of internal feedback from engineering and PM, I arrived at the 4th iteration site map seen below. To the team, logically this flow made sense but since we haven’t done any user testing, we don’t actually know if this is the best answer to resolve our product or design goals.
4th Iteration wireframes of user flow
We conducted 8 remote user testing sessions with interview questions and figma prototypes that participants used with their phone. As it turns out the user flow was a flop. Initial assumptions we made on user interaction were completely wrong, forcing us to rethink and reconsider our design with what we learned.
One issue users had was understanding what exactly the onboarding process was. Users typically got stuck on the recommendation preview screen and didn’t know how to continue.
To combat this we removed the recommendation preview screen and added checkpoint screens which gave context as to what were the next steps in the onboarding process.
Another issue was that users were struggling with how to answer profile questions about them. Formatting was unclear and some questions were just unnecessary to achieving our recommendation strategy.
As a result we ended up simplifying our flow to one question per page and introducing button selectors to avoid input confusion.
In comparison to other established podcast apps, ours was lacking standard features. From subscriptions to custom playlists, users had no motivation to come back except for the recommendations.
Conforming to the norm we introduced the ability to follow podcasts as well as categorizing recommendations based on user preferences. For now, this was acceptable while other standard features were on the backlog.
Logo’s change overtime for many companies but the main attribute I wanted to remain constant was for the logo to have a meaning behind it. Upon conducting many iterations on the logo I received mixed reactions on every iteration, there was no clear direction except my design intuition.
Fun fact: Auby = Audio + Buddy
Introducing a periwinkle color, California sunset gradient and Poppins sans-serif typeface was done to instill Auby as a friendly audio buddy you could trust.
Brand is not just on how it looks but user perception
I specifically chose Feather icons not only for their minimalistic modern look but also for their open source capabilities that could be easily implemented for the engineers.
Minimalist, simple and straight to the point icons
Below is the final iteration feature highlight of wireframes and prototypes I was able to create using Protopie. Although a design can never be perfect, I am pleased to see how far the design has come from day one.
Throughout onboarding, users are able answer questions that will directly influence their recommendation results
A familiar interface that gets users off the ground and running with personalized podcast recommendations on sign in
Users have the power to control what preference information the algorithm receives and make changes to their preferences
A seamless transition from mobile to desktop, making it easy to access your podcasts on whatever device you choose
Taking a look back at our design and product goals, below is a summary of improvements we’ve made moving us closer to the ideal experience
I’m so glad that as a team we were able to agree on spending the time and effort to conduct user testing. There have been times where user testing was not possible and results were sub-par.
User testing helped the team clarify some initial assumptions we had about users and make major changes in the design early on with the onboarding and home features. Although this essentially wasted some engineering time, it’s better we explored this route early on than realizing this mistake later on down the road.
Early on in the product conceptualization, collecting as much data on the user was crucial to improving the accuracy of the recommendation algorithm. What we realized was there was a trade off between what we were asking and user responses.
Some questions frustrated the user while others found it odd that a podcast app wanted to know their political stance. Good thing we conducted multiple rounds of user testing on the profile questions to eliminate unnecessary questions
Common features such as social media log in, color gradients with dark mode and UI concepts were nice to have but not a priority.
Having some software development knowledge played a key part in negotiating and understanding the technologies used to develop the app itself. Listening to a developer about programming and explaining why some components needed to be this way for UX reasons made me realize why every designer should learn how to code.
Fortunately a majority of the team is still working on the app, preparing for the next iteration of features. As for me, this is my first experience at a start-up and i now understand what people mean by “you’ll be wearing many different hats”.
Overall i really enjoyed getting to know my team and going from concept to a real working app in such a short amount of time. Although sometimes stressful, I learned a lot not only about startups but also about taking design leadership.