Apple Podcast Redesign

“It is in using your phone while driving that you’ll discover if your app is truly easy to use or not” -Kellie Carlson. While that may not be a real profound quote, I stand by it. I was driving for 12 hours the other day and since I’m an avid podcast listener, I found myself hitting emotional bumps along the way when it came time to navigate the Apple podcast app while also trying to navigate my way home. The wonderful thing about being in design is that if you don’t like something you really can change it, so I decided that I would re-imagine the app to create a better user experience.

Fixing the “Listen Now” Tab

If you use the apple podcast app you’ll know that when looking at the “Listen now” tab the episode you’re streaming is at the bottom. The odd thing is, when you click on the bottom icon the current episode stays at the bottom while a list of upcoming episodes are listed. Personally this didn’t make sense to me, if I wanted to tap into what I was listening to right now why would I need to be sent to a list of upcoming episodes?

When redesigning this functionality I made sure to keep the current episode top and center while also giving users the ability to see what would be coming next. Part of listening to podcasts, at least personally, is discovering new stories that you might like — because of this I created this page to allow users the ability to see other show that are related to the one they’re listening to so they can add them to their library or play next.

Increasing Brand Identity

Another design decision I made was to find more ways to incorporate the color purple into the app. The current version really only uses purple to show which tab you’re in and then as the font color for the Podcast station name. I wanted to make it a defining color of the platform so I used it as a background color for the up next page and used it when showing status in both the episode and volume level.

Improving Interactions

While driving I found myself irritated when trying to figure out which episodes were in my queue. One of the issues I have with the current layout is that when you go through the app you lose major access to the current episode you’re listening to. When revamping the layout I wanted to make sure that your current episode is front and center while also allowing users to move around the app and build upon their current listening experience.

The current app allows you to add a show to “play next” but there’s no clear way to see the current order. In my version I made it easy to see the up next episodes and giving users the ability to drag episodes into the order they want. I also made it easier to access similar, new shows by giving users the ability to toggle between their queue and suggestions quickly- instead of having to scroll all the way to the bottom of the tab.

I also moved the ability to adjust the sound from another horizontal bar to a vertical one on the right hand side. For time the linear bar makes sense but having two horizontal bars puts work on the user to differentiate between each bars functionality so I decided to move the volume bar to a vertical one.

More Information- Skippers rejoice!

If you’ve ever listened to 12 hours of podcasts you’ll probably understand the annoyance in hearing “enter promo code ____ at checkout.” Apple podcast has given users easy access to move through this by offering a 30 second skip button, but I wanted to give avid listeners a clearer idea of when they would be experiencing ads by adding in clear lines to the time bar. For lengthy episodes pods usually have short ads in the beginning and end and a longer one in the middle — to help navigate this I made sure change the line width to help inform users how many ads they’d be skipping through.

This is far from a perfect remake of the classic app, but in looking at my own pain points I feel like this would help reduce the amount of work on the users. Hopefully by my next stateside road trip Apple will take time to listen to their devoted users and create a better experience for those distracted users who need a more easy to use app.