Case Study
Pod Play
A a smarter way to experience podcasts, from playback to ideas worth saving.
BACKGROUND
Prompt
Pod Play was created to offer listeners a more personalized and engaging podcast experience. This app is meant to streamline podcast discovery, listening, and community interaction by providing personalized recommendations, seamless listening, and enhanced episode engagement tools.
Imagine opening a podcast app that immediately understands your mood, recommends fresh content, and helps you engage in meaningful ways with shows you love?
Design Thinking Process
I mainly adopted the design thinking process for this project
A user-centered approach guided each phase, Empathizing with the users, discovering their frustrations, Defining the problem and their core needs, Ideating thoughtful solutions, and Prototyping, designing and delivering a seamless podcast listening experience.
EMPATHIZE
User Interviews
I conducted interviews and sent out online surveys to podcast listeners aged 18–40, including students, working professionals, and housewives. The interview questions were open-ended, exploring how they listen to podcasts, what frustrates them, and what features they wish existed.
Persona Development
Insights from user interviews revealed distinct podcast listeners mindsets and behaviors. These were translated into four key personas. Each represented a unique set of needs and pain points, helping define design decisions, prioritize essential features, and craft an experience that feels relevant and intuitive across different podcast listening scenerios
Empathy Map
Based on user interviews and persona development, an aggregated empathy map was created to visualize shared experiences, emotions, and pain points. Standout quotes revealed expectations, frustrations, and behaviors that shaped how users think, feel, and act while listening to podcasts. Mapping these patterns provided deeper insight into user needs and helped translate them into meaningful design opportunities.
DEFINE
Competitive Analysis
I reviewed major podcast apps like Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Anghami. After analyzing their features and user feedback, I identified common gaps that could develop into opportunity areas for Pod Play.
Key Features:
• Minimalistic and distraction-free interface
• Voice Searching Features
• Playlist system allowing categorization of podcasts
• Smart recommendations based on listening habits
• Attractive, familiar user interface
• Easy subscription and following system for new shows
• Reliable download and offline listening capabilities
• Intuitive episode queue and playlist management
Gaps:
• Hard to find and resume unfinished episodes quickly
• No in-app tools to take notes or save insights
• User experience focused mainly on passive listening, not active engagement
Opportunity Areas for Pod Play:
• Continue Listening: easy resumption across sessions
• Podcast Caption Note-Taking: highlight, save, and revisit ideas directly from episode captions
Problem Statement
Analyzing competitor apps and insights from user interviews, Existing podcast platforms prioritize passive listening offering limited tools for active engagement and personalized content management.
As a result, users often lose track of partially heard episodes, forget valuable information shared during shows, and feel less connected to the content. This lead to my key design question:
How might we help podcast listeners better manage their listening experience and interact more meaningfully with podcast content?
IDEATE
Key Features
Each feature in Pod Play was thoughtfully developed in response to common pain points identified through user research. Whether it’s resuming a session without interruption or capturing meaningful moments mid-episode, Pod Play is designed to support a more intentional and accessible podcast experience. The goal: to empower listeners with greater control, continuity, and connection to the content they value most.
Continue Listening
Users often engage with podcasts in fragmented sessions, A common frustration arises when resuming playback, especially across multiple devices or after extended pauses.
To address this, Pod Play implements a seamless "Continue Listening" capability, ensuring users can resume any episode precisely where they left off, without manual scrubbing or disruption. This feature supports a smooth, uninterrupted listening experience tailored to real-world usage patterns.
To address this, Pod Play implements a seamless "Continue Listening" capability, ensuring users can resume any episode precisely where they left off, without manual scrubbing or disruption. This feature supports a smooth, uninterrupted listening experience tailored to real-world usage patterns.
Podcast Caption Note-Taking
Many podcast listeners use audio as a source of learning, inspiration, or reflection. However, capturing insights mid-listen can be challenging especially without integrated tools.
Pod Play introduces a caption-based note-taking system that allows users to highlight sections of captions, save them, write notes and revisit those segments later. This interaction supports knowledge retention and empowers users to engage more deeply with the content, especially in educational, professional, or self-development contexts.
Pod Play introduces a caption-based note-taking system that allows users to highlight sections of captions, save them, write notes and revisit those segments later. This interaction supports knowledge retention and empowers users to engage more deeply with the content, especially in educational, professional, or self-development contexts.
PROTOTYPE
User Flow
From the research and insights I gathered, I began by outlining an ideal user flow for my podcast app, envisioning how users would interact with key features and what their experience would look like from start to finish. The goal was to ensure a seamless and enjoyable experience that matched the expectations and needs of my target users.
Design System
As part of building a consistent and scalable UI for PodPlay, I developed a comprehensive design system. This system ensured visual coherence across all screens and helped streamline collaboration during the prototyping and development phases.
Low-Fidelity Prototypes
After defining the user flow and experience, I moved on to creating low-fidelity prototypes to visualize the app’s structure and layout. These wireframes were designed to explore the basic functionality, user flow and interactions without focusing on visual details. The goal was to test the core elements such as navigation, content discovery, and playback control and ensure that users could easily understand and interact with the app. These early prototypes served as a blueprint, allowing me to test them and identify potential issues and iterate the overall experience before advancing to higher-fidelity designs.
High-Fidelity Prototypes
With the low-fidelity wireframes serving as a solid foundation, I created high-fidelity prototypes that brought the app’s design and experience to life. Through multiple iterations of low and high-fidelity prototypes, I arrived at this final prototype. This version represents the fully realized app, incorporating all design elements, user feedback, and usability testing.
