GoodPods

Product Designer • October 2019 - March 2020

Goodpods is a 2-sided social marketplace that helps podcast listeners find new podcast recommendations while helping podcasters connect with their audience.

My Role

I was the designer for Goodpods and worked directly with a product manager and primary stakeholders. I was involved with every step from defining problems, strategy, design and prototyping.

Defining the problem

Podcast listeners wanted recommendations from people they know and respect.

User problems

People who listen to podcasts wanted a source for recommendations on what they should listen to next.

1. While many podcast listeners use Apple podcasts or Spotify, there isn’t an easy way on these apps to find recommendations from people they actually know.

2. Recommendations provided by other apps and google searches don’t feel personal. Listeners want to know what friends and influencers have to say about a podcast.

Business problems

Goodpods wanted to help users find their next favorite podcast

1. With Goodpods being so new, there wasn’t enough traffic in the app. In order to help people find podcast recommendations, you need people to provide recommendations.

Measuring success

The power in numbers

When we look at reviews for a product, we trust the ones that are reviewed by more people. With Goodpods, our goal was to increase engagement in the app which we hypothesized would help people find the podcast recommendations they are looking for. Metrics to indicate success were:

1. Increase engagement in the feed

   The more people sharing and discussing podcasts, the more recommendations there would be in a database for users to discover new podcasts.

2. More time spent in the app

   The more time people are spending in the app, the more likely they are to take an active role in the community.

Exploring Solutions

Putting the Social in Social App

Based on the problems we identified, I explored user stories to identify user needs and ultimately discover ways to help them find new podcasts.

User story 1:

As a user who wants new recommendations on podcasts, I want to be able to find recommendations easily that are relevant and personalized for me. I want to know:

Who else has listened to it? More importantly, who do I know that has listened to it and what do they have to say about it?

I explored a range of feed units that aimed to be more relevant. It had to be compact but pack in a lot of data for the user to digest at a glance. Prioritization of desired user behaviours was key. I concluded that users would connect at a more personal level to a count of their friends who listened to the episode than an overall count of likes on the post. Further emphasis was placed on the share button to encourage engagement.

User story 2:

As a user who wants to introduce my friends to new podcasts, I want to seamlessly share my thoughts while listening.

There are many ways a user can share a podcast, but we wanted to funnel more traffic in to the feed. In order to reduce friction, we landed on a share menu that prioritized sharing to the feed.

As an effort to increase further engagement and reduce friction for sharing, Goodpods automatically shares to the followers feed podcasts you are listening to. When a user is looking at their own feed, they can see an inline component that allows them to add their thoughts retroactively.

The resulting feed design was a compact but powerful way for users to interact with the people they follow and find their next favourite podcast.

Looking ahead

Emptiness is Loneliness

I’ve heard it time and time again that one of the reasons people love podcasts is because it feels like the podcasters are your friends in the room with you, discussing topics that are important to you. When a podcast episode ends, it can feel kind of abrupt and eerily quiet. The more we know about a listener’s behaviour, the more specific we can be with recommendations for their next listen, continually replacing that awkward silence with another great episode.

I’d also love to explore interactive events in the future. I can imagine a world where podcasters can host live events on Goodpods, listeners would be able to interact directly with podcasters and others in real time. Enabling the host to answer questions and build rapport would support the community mission that Goodpods strives for.