Pandora: Podcasts

Having released a premium “on demand” listening product , Pandora sought to further it’s content offering with podcasts and long form audio programs. Because this feature set is touching many different areas of the product, partnership and communication became key. We created a cross functional agile working group that speaks daily, meets bi-weekly, and checks in with various other product team members and executive team members regularly. Mobile first at launch (as 80% of our users are on mobile) we began with identifying core features as user stories and requirements. Looking to begin with our existing user base, we gathered invaluable data through user surveys, examined competitive music services with podcasts, and looked at leading podcasting apps to begin with a solid podcast feature offering at launch. More Info Here

Getting started

Leading a company wide, national, and cross functional team, we began meeting weekly - dissecting competitors, combing through our own internal research, hosting casual user surveys, and establishing our compelling launch version requirements.

creative kickoff

Looking at past successes with projects, I began with drafting simple product principles as statements to help guide decisions and solutions. Topics like "users find podcasting on Pandora to be simple, effortless, and familiar" and "Pandora does it for me" were included to build the ease that our users expect from Pandora as fundamentals into the project. I also began sketches to understand how to the new content types could live in the product, communicating these early proposals to the product leadership team.

Ideas, Sketches, Concepts, Rinse & repeat

Starting with the core Playback features like the "Now Playing" screen, player controls, and content screen, these features were explored and honed - first as loose sketches with accompanying questions. In fact, there were so many open questions and ideas, that I started logging them and sharing with product managers and engineers to get some answers. Reviewing and moving to wireframe concepts started to bring this to life.

Early Key Screens Wire Flow

Examples of some early work for key screens to illustrate the user's journey and experience as they interact with podcasts throughout the product.

Further Explorations of Key Screens

Chipping away at our concepts, the features began to take shape. Along the way, we also uncovered some interesting obstacles (collisions, roadmap tradeoffs, phasing features for future releases, etc.) in our path to create a compelling feature set for launch.

Prototyping

I began to incorporate prototypes into my feedback sessions and meetings to illustrate the key flows and features. This really brought the concept to life and was a turning point to help inform and make decisions on how we were to move forward.

Usertesting

Once the key flows began to take shape with prototyping - many questions came up regarding user expectations, user experience, interactions and interface. Leading a national team of designers, we built various models and versions, hosted various user studies, and testing sessions to answer questions and gain insights - the feedback was literal gold when it came to this project.

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Big questions:Now Playing Screen

Controls became a big topic of discussion, company wide. Do we include thumbs? What do they do?
With limited space and ease of use important to the feature, what features do we display?
Through user testing sessions we were able to answer these questions and validate our concepts.

QUestion: How to decide what to listen to?

Because the commitment level is higher with listening to podcasts (average episodes are about 30-40 min) we tested variations of how episodes are represented, and what content is present to assist the user with selecting an episode on a podcast show page.

Rows that reflect the content and status

The launch pattern reflected user data and validated proposals: include descriptions, "listened” status or “time left”, episodic shows (the majority of podcasts) should be sorted by date, and serial programs by season and internal listening order.

QUestion: Podcasts aren’t Music, where do they live?

When “collecting” (what Pandora calls adding or subscribing) shows and episodes across all subscription levels, the previous feature “My Music” or “My Stations” no longer was relevant and needed to be renamed to encompass the new content type

Empower our listeners & Emphasize podcast discovery

Identified as a major, MAJOR, like for real – MAJOR issue with any podcast app, discovering new podcasts is a giant issue we aimed to solve. At day 1, we had accurate podcast recommendations for users - bootstrapping their listening experience. Generating a podcast genome, as we have done for music, this powers the recommendations made possible by transcribing each episode down to the topic level. We take full advantage of this ability by linking to browse, similar content, categories, and enabling keyword/topic search.