Deezer
You bring the passion,
We bring the podcasts
Concept Project • 4-person team • 2 weeks sprint
The Challenge
Podcasts are on the rise worldwide and in the light of Covid-19, they are gaining even more popularity.
Our four-person team was tasked with building a social network and discussion around podcasts into the existing Deezer platform.
The Solution
Created a way of listening to podcasts that is more social and gave extra ways for users to connect around the globe.
The final design concept included features such as podcast discovery, users can read and add comments, users can chat with friends via private chats and find people with similar tastes to them.
My Role
Competitive analysis, user research, app map, affinity mapping, persona, empathy map, user flow, user testing, wireframing, usability testing, UI, presentation, interactive prototype.
Tools: Sketch, InVision, Adobe Photoshop, Miro
— This case study was also featured in the UX Collective’s BOOTCAMP publication
Who are our competitors
The focus was on direct competitors — apps where the main offering was podcasts, and indirect competitors.
The main insights from this process were:
sharing and recommendation features were strong across all platforms
podcast apps don’t really offer community aspects and social networks
Understanding our users
We recruited 100 survey participants and interviewed a total of 15 people with the aim to understand their goals, expectations, painpoints, frustrations around podcasts and social media.
Key insights we have uncovered during our interviews were that:
People enjoy discussing media they consume with friends and family
Finding a good podcast is not easy
Podcasts are very personal as they can be a reflection of our personality and interests
Listening to podcasts is a secondary activity for most
Meet Natalia
To represent our findings, we created a persona whose likes and frustrations were inspired by research observations and would guide our design decisions.
We also used some of the data from the screener survey to add to Natalia’s character. For example, 54.7% of the people who completed the survey were aged 25–34, so it made sense to include Natalia in this demographic.
Natalia’s empathy map
After creating our persona, we then created an empathy map to understand her better.
Natalia has a problem…
Natalia needs a way to connect with others around podcasts because she’s lacking inspiration and she knows the best recommendations come from people of like mind
Design Studio
It was now time to make Natalia’s frustrations into opportunities for design. For the design studio we used the How Might We (HMW) design thinking in order to see how we can resolve Natalia’s problem. We refined these problems to form three HMW statements to focus on going further.
How Might We…
make a curated list of recommended podcasts for Natalia based on her tastes?
create a safe place for users to share and discuss podcasts?
connect Natalia with family and friends to share and get podcast recommendations?
The app map
We investigated Deezer’s current app map in order to understand the existing information architecture and then created a proposed app map with the features we were looking to introduce. This acted as the skeleton of Deezer’s new structure.
Disclaimer: I personally revisited this project and added Likes and User Profiles to the app map along with features such as podcast recommendations made by other users, the option to like a podcast episode or access to other users’ profile.
Features we prioritized:
share podcast snippet
private chats
add and view comments on podcast episodes
Natalia’s journey through the app
We then moved to outlining the ideal user flow which lays out each of the screens Natalia will see during her journey through the app.
Final Prototype
At the end of this 2 week sprint, we had produced a high-fidelity mock up of our design as well as a clickable prototype in InVision to bring it to life.
The key interactions and flows of the high-fidelity prototype are shown below (designed in Sketch and animated in InVision).
The animation above introduces Deezer’s new social aspect followed by a re-designed Shows screen. It then continues with the flow for liking a specific podcast, viewing another user’s profile and adding a friend.
The animation above shows the flow for when the user receives a message from a friend, sees the podcast snippet that has been shared and opens up the discussion.
Outcome
The final design concept included:
The ability for users to view and add comments
Podcast discovery - users can discover new podcasts through their friends
Users are able to find people with similar tastes to them
Users can chat with their friends via private chats
Learnings
When collaborating on a project, using files and systems with communal access is hugely beneficial for an efficient team workflow. Sketch is limited in this regard, meaning continual saving and re-uploading of documents was required when we were developing the digital wireframes.
Next Steps
Taking this concept forward, I would:
Further develop the clip-sharing feature
Allow users the option to share playlists with friends
Conduct more testing