2020 - Shits & Giggles

More Podcasts Please.

Podcasts have obviously become a staple of the media landscape and continues to grow. While many new products have entered the space to facilitate ad sales and tracking listener metrics, one continued challenge for both listeners and creators is discoverability. How do you find more shows you like?

I am team Spotify in the Spotify vs. Apple Music debate and decided to explore how a platform with so much media could use their catalogue to connect listeners to more shows. A win-win customers get more content they love, Spotify gets users spending more time on the platform.

Story Time:

When I was a kid I remember riding in the backseat of my grandpas car and being so annoyed with his AM talk radio shows. “This is boring” - “can we listen to music? please!?” (little did I know i wouldn’t like his music either). Now, an adult, and in control of my own stereo I am constantly listening to podcasts, or as I call it - millennial AM radio.

Project Type:

Product - Mobile App

Deliverables

A Cure for Lockdown Boredom

Auditing the current experience for opportunities.

Instead of trying to completely reimagine the Spotify experience I started by doing a brief audit of the current app. I looked for opportunities to leverage, or iterate, on existing patterns.

One area I felt is under utilized is the vertical scroll space beneath the audio player. Currently not being used in the podcast play, for music it is used for "Storyline" and "Behind the Lyrics" on some songs. This space is valuable real estate and has plenty of potential if expanded to the podcast player.

Expanding Existing Patterns to Deliver More Value.

While exploring this space in the context of podcasts vs music I thought of a few different ways that this space could be used to benefit both the listener and the creators beyond discoverability.

Discovery

By using this space we can provide related content to listeners. We can recommend popular episodes from this show, we can show different shows that the host(s) appears on, and we can show content that features the guest. In this case we bring relevant content directly to the user in the media player while allowing them to add content to their library. This curation based on a specific piece of content can expose a listener to whole new catalogue they may not have know about before.

Maintaining Media Controls

We do not want to remove the user from the media player completely so this design clips a modified version of the media player to the top of the screen. This way as listeners are r exploring additional content, they can pause or jump back in case they missed something.

Opportunities for Increasing Engagement

As Spotify tries to compete for users attention there is one big thing that currently works against them. Most people have Spotify on in the background while they do other things. In some cases this is necessary, like while we drive, or do household chores, however a big part many peoples everyday is spent scrolling.

Ad Placement & Affiliate Links:

‍We could also encourage sponsor engagement. Podcasts need sponsorships to make money and there is a lot of challenges with attribution in the marketing side of podcasts. By adding a sponsorship section we can track more attribution with clicks and place custom attribution links right here.

The Dreaded (But Oddly Beloved) Comment Section

With the rise of community mangers and all of us spending more time at home, Spotify could create an opportunity for creators to engage with their fans and allow fans to interact with each other on the platform.