Deezer
Building a social network and discussion around podcasts
Group concept project as part of General Assembly’s UX Design Immersive course. This was a 2-week design sprint.
The brief
For this group concept project my team was tasked with building a social network and discussion around podcasts into Deezer’s mobile app.
My role
My team consisted of myself and three other classmates. A flat structure and no dominant personality in the group threatened to derail the project from the outset. The team dynamic prompted me early on to play a facilitator role to ensure that the team stayed on track and that all members could contribute in a supportive and collaborative way. I used Miro, a digital whiteboard, to encourage everyone to contribute in a passive but active way and help focus the team on the task at hand.
Discovery phase
The discovery phase began with reviewing the business requirements before exploring customer needs through qualitative user interviews. This was supplemented with competitive review.
Business needs
Deezer would like to make listening to podcasts more social and give extra ways and levels for users to connect around the globe. Users should be able to:
- Comment on podcasts
- Discuss podcasts with people in their network
- Find people in their network
Competitive review
The top podcast players in the market, Apple Podcasts and Spotify, have not currently built in a social network around their podcasts. Therefore it was important to also analyse indirect competitors with social networks to identify common design principles that could be used in Deezer.
From the table above, we learned two things:
- Social elements that might be expected — the option to share, get algorithm-generated recommendations, and connect with people
- Social elements that present an opportunity gap (popular on social networks but not offered by direct competitors)— comments and reactions
We saw an opportunity to reposition Deezer as a podcast platform that offers a high level of personalised content and community interaction.
User interviews
The next step was to validate with potential users the assumption that they wanted a social network around podcasts. Do users actually want a social network around podcasts? How do they currently interact with and discuss podcasts? How do they use social media? Those were the questions we sought to answer through a short survey and qualitative user interviews.
Surveys
The survey was sent out to people in our network and we received over 100 responses. The survey results revealed the following insights:
- Most people enjoy discussing with others media they consume
- The best recommendations come from friends or family (35%) and algorithms (24%)
- The vast majority of people (71%) aren’t interested in web forums or online communities and only 3% are active posters
Interviews
We made an assumption that target users of a socially-driven podcast app would be podcast listeners who are active on social media. Therefore, we decided to conduct interviews with this target group.
Key learnings:
From the fifteen interviews conducted, a broadly consistent set of needs and pain points emerged:
- Finding a great podcast is not easy
- Family and friends are the best source of recommendations
- Listening to podcasts is a secondary activity
- Some people feel bored and limited by their playlist
- Podcasts are seen as a reflection of our personalities
- Online communities / web forums are generally not loved
Persona and problem to solve
To help keep the users’ needs front of mind throughout the design process, we created a persona based on the users we interviewed.
Keeping ourselves in Natalia’s shoes, we used another UX tool known as an Empathy Map to understand her thoughts and feelings.
At this point, my team was clear on the user for whom we were designing, her needs and pain points. To guide our design thinking, we honed in on the problem to solve:
Natalia needs a way to connect with others around podcasts because she’s lacking inspiration and knows the best recommendations come from people of like mind.
Ideation and sketching
Now that we had a problem in mind, we ran a design studio to come up with a bunch of ideas to solve it. To help do this, we used another UX tool, ‘How might we’ statements, to get the creative juices flowing:
- How might we curate a list of recommended podcasts for Natalia based on her tastes?
- How might we create a safe place for users to share and discuss podcasts?
- How might we connect Natalia with family and friends to share and get podcast recommendations?
Great ideas came out of the design studio, which, also proved to be a fantastic bonding experience. Out of this, we extracted a bunch of potential features to include in our designs.
Feature prioritisation… and disputation
We decided to focus on those features we deemed essential and feasible to deliver in the given timeframe. There was some wrangling here. One team member wanted to include all the features and do so in a separate app. Despite the rest of us not agreeing to this, it took the involvement of teaching staff to convince this person to go with group consensus.
User flow through the app
To determine which screens to design and the flow between them, we created a user flow mapping Natalia’s journey through Deezer. We imagined a typical scenario faced by her —Natalia is about to head out for a walk and wants to listen to a podcast. She notices she has a message from a friend in the app.
Navigation
The last piece of the puzzle before jumping into design was deciding how best to incorporate the additional features into the existing Deezer app. As touched on earlier, this led to much debate in the team. In the end, we went for design consistency with Deezer’s current layout and navigation.
Design phase
Our design efforts for the sprint focussed on testing to quickly capture and iterate on feedback gathered from usability testing. The core principle was to add new social elements while still maintaining Deezer’s design style outlined on their website.
This was an iterative process that started with basic sketches on paper and ended with a high-fidelity clickable prototype.
Key learnings
We moved through the levels of fidelity, testing with over 30 users at each stage of fidelity. Feedback centred on flow of screens, navigation, spacing and font size:
- Reduce the number of steps to get from notifications to the related post
- Remove the activity feed — feedback was mixed and didn’t add value in current format
- Change the podcast clip sharing to play within the chat — first designed as a pop-up screen
- Increase font size — in places the font size was too small for users
Improved design
To help users understand the new features we had added into Deezer, we created a set of onboarding screens.
The final designs below show the user’s flow from chat notification through to adding a comment on the podcast. This very simply and subtly adds in a social network to Deezer’s podcast app in a way that addresses our users needs and pain points. Jumping into Natalia’s shoes again, we imagine she’s about to go for a walk. She spots the notification that someone has sent her a message. Her friend Mark has sent her a clip to check out. She enjoys the clip and clicks to listen to the full podcast. After listening to it, she takes a look at the comments and adds her own thoughts.
Next design sprint
This new user flow very simply and subtly adds in a social network to Deezer’s podcast app in a way that addresses our user needs and pain points:
- Allows for people to get podcast recommendations and discuss with family or friends through clip-sharing and messaging
- Facilitates discussion on your favourite podcasts with like-minded people through a comments section
Next steps include:
- Flesh out how to create the podcast clip sharing feature
- Collaborative podcast playlist was a popular feature in our design studio
- Redesign and rethink the friend activity feed
Challenges and key learnings
For me the key takeaway from this project was about collaboration. As a group we got along just fine but we each had very different work styles. I’ve always been a believer that each person brings unique value to a project and, instead of writing them off because they don’t work in the same way I do, it is my job as a member of that team to allow them to work in a way that maximises their potential so that the whole team is greater than the sum of its parts.
