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 curated 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
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RESEARCH
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
Based on user interviews insights, I created these primary personas to represent key goals, behaviors, and pain points of our target users.
Empathy Map
Using personas and user interviews, I created this aggregated empathy map to visualize common experiences, emotions, and pain points of the users
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 Players.
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?
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PRODUCT STRUCTURE
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.
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DESIGN SOLUTIONS
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 and interactions without focusing on visual details. The goal was to test the core elements—such as navigation, content discovery, and playback controls—and ensure that users could easily understand and interact with the app. These early prototypes served as a blueprint, allowing me to identify potential issues and refine 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.
