PROJECT BACKGROUND

Podcast is becoming a fashionable thing in China recent years. There are more people listen to podcast and more podcast producers making chinese podcast with great quality. There are also many new podcast platforms such as Xiao Yu Zhou (Est. 2020), Pi Ting (Est. 2020), and spotify-like music apps start providing podcasts like QQ Music, NetEase Cloud Music and Ximalaya. They all dive into podcast around same time.

Nevertheless, podcast is still a niche hobby amoung Chinese. It is primarily popular amoung white collars in 1st-tier cities. Many students, elderlies, 2nd and 3rd-tier citizens don’t know what podcast is.

How to establish user mental model towards podcast in Cloud Music is the primary task that Cloud Music Podcast Business needed to figure out when I joint the podcast product team 2 years ago. Obviously the podcast product team hadn’t figured it out at that time. We can see it from a user’s feedback.

“When I entered podcast page, I got lost. There were so many different types of tcontents and I didn’t know what podcast is. It seemed like a market with no organisaztion.”

This is quite understandable. Unlike podcast providers outside of China which provide podcast (I call it “narrowly defined podcast”) contents only, many chinese podcast platforms provide podcast (I call it “broadly defined podcast”) that includes not only podcast but radio drama, talkshow, audiobook, music radio, and emotion healing radio.

Cloud Music is nothing different. Moreover, for some complicated reasons, DJ music and cover version music are also categorised into Podcast sector, which makes the page more confused to users.

Because of this complicated contents variations and lack of podcast mental model, I was trying to find a solution to quickly establish user’s mental model and let users easily try our contents without obstacle so we can get users’ preference data and distribute contents that suit users’ interests.

Understanding Users

so I started with our users.

I re-analysed the latest user research results, and found out 4 typical user scenarios. There were some interesting points that inspired me.

1. The layout and style is very similar to the homepage, with lots of music contents (by default), users give up and get back to homepage to explore music.

2. Users get lost in the Podcast page and are not aware what categories of contents there are.

3. The layout and display of information makes user difficult to decide which podcast to listen.

4. Many users don’t care what the podcast is about. They only need a background sound while doing housework or other activities like the old way of listening to the radio.

Design Objectives

The content team and algorithm team were continuously improving the contents displayed to the different types of users, while I decided to design a new feature to achieve following objectives to slove problems that were identified from user scenarios.

1. Differentiate podcast page, so users would like to stay and explore the page.

2. Help users understand types of content offered on our platform, and help users find contents they want.

3. An easy way for user to start listening.

Designing for Uniqueness and Familarity

Podcast is originated from radio broadcast. I thought having a radio experience would be a unique experience that distinguish podcast to others and also a good way for users to taste what podcast it.

As mentioned above, we have vairous of “podcast” categories, just like different frequencies on the radio. With similar experience, users are able to browse what they like to listen and don’t get lost.

We’ve also considered visually replicate the radio experience, which, on the other hand, indicate users how to interact with it.

Results

It also provides an entertaining way to explore contents that fulfill users’ specific intention.

The data explains everything. After 2 months, there are 600,000 daily active users using this feature, which is about 35% of total podcast DAU.

It could be said that Podcast FM made a success. However, we still continously kept eyes on user feedback and decided to optimise this feature 6 months after it has been released.

User Feedback

Although many feedbacks were about the content, the major experience issue we received was the lack of freedom. We started with the idea that radio broadcast is a livestream service which means, you get what we offer. It succeeded at the beginning, but soon when our users got a taste of podcast, they want to explore more but the Next button is implicit.

So we decided to solve this problem in our version 2.0.

Podcast fm version 2.0

As seen above, I used scroller for the content to indicate users that there were more content to be found. We also added an animation to inform user that they can scroll the content when they saw the update.

In order to distinguish between scrolling content and scrolling frequencies (in our case - the category), we added a light haptic viberation when scrolling the category, so users can scroll the specific area without a glance. Additionally, it adds more feelings like a real radio.

As a result, we received positive feedbacks from our users as well as increase in content exposure and click rate.

Final Thoughts

This project was a good example to demonstrate how we can use the object around us as an inspiration to help we design, but also demostrate that same experience may not suit the digital experience.

I am very proud of this project, because statistically it brings a huge improve in our DAU and meet our objective - to establish user mental model. It has strong vitality that we keep iterate this feature over 2 years and we are still iterating it.

At the end, I’d like to show a competitor’s tribute below.

After we released our Podcast FM 1.0, I found another competitor app loved our design so much that they replicated it and after we released version 2.0, they followed the same step.

I believe it’s the biggest compliment to our design.

Hope you enjoy.