Role

UX/UI Designer

Duration

1 day (Hackathon)

Overview

For a one-day hackathon project, another UI designer and I wanted to brand and design a mobile app for podcast listening.

1 | Design Thinking

Since we only had a day to design the app, we gather some user data by observing how people use various podcast apps and asked random people in Rosslyn about what they liked, disliked, and wanted from these apps. Then we wrote all our notes from these observations and conversations on post-it notes and grouped them by their similarity. We used these groups to help focus our goal and ideate. We also looked at podcast apps that were already in the market.

2 | Wireframes + Prototype

I listed out all our “must have” and “nice to have” features. Then based on that list of ideas, each of us created wireframes of our potential podcast listening app.

Since we were short on time, we used pictures of our wireframe sketches to create a prototype. We ran a quick usability test and asked our co-workers to interact with it. This step helped us see what people liked about the app and reveal any biases we had towards our initial design and idea.

3 | Branding

Before starting on our high-fidelity mockups, we needed to think of our app’s name and branding. The other UI designer on this project and I love Harry Potter and Dungeons and Dragons. So, we wanted to do something related to magic. For our logo, I combined a wand with the wifi signal. We chose white and purple as our primary colors because, according to color psychology, purple often signifies “creativity” and “magic,” which fit well with the logo and branding.

-Feature Highlight-

When asked how and why users typically start a podcast, they said that they usually heard it word of mouth from their friends. Many users voiced that it was difficult to stumble upon and discover new podcasts without looking through a myriad of podcasts and genres.

In order to differentiate ourselves from the other podcast listening apps, we wanted to create a unique feature that really embodied our “magical” branding.

We designed this feature called “daily roulette” that was inspired by dating apps. The feature would play short snippets/trailers of random podcasts and our users would have the chance to swipe left to skip and right to add to their queue. In order to provide more context to the podcast, we also displayed various tags underneath the podcast title.