ActPod
Overview
I partnered with UCI Antrepreneur to help a startup founder create a podcasting app. Our product aimed to eliminate the following frustrations for college students interested in podcasts:
Podcasts are intimidating and difficult to start
It's difficult for podcasters to gain feedback on their content
Listeners can't directly connect with podcasters
My Role: Product Designer
My Team: 1 Founder, 1 PM, 3 designers, 3 developers
I Owned: User flows, wireframes, prototyping, user testing
I Collaborated: Branding, Product Strategy
Timeline: Sep 2023 – Mar 2024
We started with discussing our founders vision and hypothesizing what features would best address our user pain points. After much deliberation we decided to focus on:
Making our app simple and beginner friendly to address the learning curve of podcasts
Allowing our users to record podcasts directly in our app to share their stories
Encouraging listeners to interact with not only comments but also voice messages.
We then mapped out user flows for the 4 main pages of our app.
Team Brainstorming
User Flows
Home Page
Recording Page
User Profile Page
Voice Message Page
Since ActPod was a new app, brand designing was crucial in appealing to our users. We put a lot of thought into our identity and what we wanted to represent.
Logo
Our logo consisted of piecing together:
A comment icon to represent users giving feedback on podcasts
A sound wave icon inside to represent our unique voice message feature
Headphones to represent our users listening to podcasts
Color Palette
These were the colors we decided on emphasizing in our app and branding. Yellow is our main color to represents podcasters spreading positive energy and stories, blue was our secondary color to represent users calmly listening to podcasts, and black was used as our background since we wanted to foster a comfortable listening environment.
Uploading podcasts
We made the process of uploading a podcast in our app quick and seamless. Users can browse other podcasts in the home page for inspiration or go straight to the recording page to upload their own. They click record, tell their story, and upload with a description and categorization to reach their audience.
easy management and connection
In the profile page users are able to easily see and organize their podcasts and collections. In their notifications page podcasters are able to see either text or voice messages their listeners have commented. Podcasters then have the option to respond back with a voice message to continue the conversation.
Here are some screenshots of our MVP proudly published to the app store
*ActPod has since been redesigned to target users in Taiwan, but you can still check out the app at:
We did conduct user research with our targeted student group, specifically doing user interviews and A/B testing with our wireframes. Our participants did confirm out hypotheses that:
Recording podcasts directly in our app helped made podcasts less intimidating
The voice messages were a fun feature that encouraged interaction and connection
However, the data we collected was based off volunteers with most of them being friends and family. Looking back I would have like to gather more research before creating any designs to validate our assumptions and also broaden our pool of participants to reduce bias.