As a part of Applied 2020, I worked on a personal project mentored by senior designs from Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, and more. In 10 weeks I conducted research, ideation, and design for Spotify Podcasts. At the end of the program, I received awards for Best UX, Best Presentation, and Best Visual Design.

Spotify is the world's largest music streaming platform and is known for their great user experience. In recent years, they have focused on adding podcasts and audiobooks to become the source for all audio content. I was tasked to improve on Spotify Podcasts in any way I wanted as the challenge for Applied 2020.

To begin the project, I focused on discovering user pain points with Spotify Podcasts. I conducted 10 semi-structured interviews with podcast listeners to learn about their habits.

The interviews showed that users really enjoyed listening to their podcasts and had no issues with the listening experience. Their main pain point was discovering new podcasts.

After I determined the design goal for the project, I did additional research to help me ideate. I focused on the Spotify experience itself with a heuristic evaluation to identify the key issues users are having. Then I conducted a competitive analysis of all the top podcast apps to determine how they showcase podcast information and promote discovery.

I then explored as many ideas as I could on how to explore podcasts. I categorized them by how much effort it would take to implement and the potential impact it would have on improving discovery. I narrowed the list to three main solutions but ultimately chose to try my idea of Featured Podcasts.

The idea is that Spotify would show reviews and recommendations for podcasts curated similar to their music playlists. Since podcasts are more content heavy, the reviews could be articles similar to movie reviews with snippets of meaningful parts. This would be easy for Spotify to highlight new podcasts and help users discover new podcasts before listening to a full episode.

I started to dive into the actual design of Featured Podcasts. The first step was to determine the information architecture of Featured Podcasts.

Then for the feature itself, I explored different homepage layouts for the Featured section and determined the information I wanted to show in each article.

With the foundation set, I began to put it together in high fidelity. I focused on maintaining consistency with the Spotify design language.

With the high fidelity designs, I did some usability testing and users loved the feature. However, there was one problem with the component for the soundbite. It was too similar to the actual podcast episode component so I redesigned it.

After I addressed the final usability findings, I worked on finalizing the designs making sure it would be worthy of Spotify. Below are the final designs for featured podcasts.

During COVID with a tough job search, this project was a breath of fresh air for me. I loved working on this project and felt it really pushed me to become better. Some of my takeways: