ListenInstead

Personas

I developed two personas with stakeholders to inform and prioritize the features of the MVP launch. I established the following about our users based on competitive research and the provided background from the founder:

Consumers / Daily Users

• Too busy to sit down and read news articles, on-the-go

• Need to stay up-to-date

• Have a variety of interested in different topics

• Enjoy Podcasts 

• Has preferred news sources 

• Wants to engage in a community, listen and share ideas

Publishers / Content Providers

• Want to grow audience

• Constantly creating content, likely distributing content to various channels

• Credibility is very important

• Also needs to stay up-to-date

• Wants to engage in a community

UX Considerations

After establishing the needs of our personas, I recommended the following features to stakeholders to prioritize for launch.

Consumers / Daily Users

• Ability to select categories of interest for suggested articles

• Include a search functionality to discover topics and news sources/ providers

• Ability to save & subscribe to articles or publishers

• Enable notifications for new content

Publishers / Content Providers

• Ability to establish a credible profile for both the publisher and journalist. (Also kicked off an internal need to vet publisher accounts which was manual for MVP)

• Ability to upload recording in-app

• Ability to record content and thought pieces/comments in-app

• Showcase top stories as well as recent stories

• Ability to switch between a publisher profile and a consumer profile

Visual Design

To differentiate between the paths for publishers and consumers, I designed ListenInstead with unique brand identities for each user experience. While the UX of each branch kept a general consistency, the color themes of menus, navigation, buttons, and visual embellishments give a different feel for the different users.

For the visual design of the app, I developed a simple style guide to establish the color themes, typography and iconography.

My goal was to develop a modern, streamlined look & feel to allow the functionality of the app and the content of the articles to shine without unnecessary elements getting in the way of usability.

UX Features

Publisher Recording Studio

One goal of the app was to provide an in-app platform for Publishers to upload and/or record audio.

To accomplish this, I created a series of pages that allow the user to input an article’s title and description along with attaching or creating an audio file. A key consideration for this flow was to ensure the Publisher had plenty of opportunity to review and confirm his choices before pushing a file live.

In this flow, you will see how a publisher can tap to ‘Upload Content’ from the main menu to add, select, and upload clips into a review stage before publishing an article to their page.

Consumer Explore Page

For consumers, a key goal was to provide an easy portal to explore different topics of interest. From my competitive research, I found that most news portals or audio-content platforms (like podcasts) provide a spectrum of ways to find content based on time, popularity, type of content, type authors/publishers, and a direct keyword search. I created the app’s homepage, the Explore Page, with each of the features available. The flows that can be taken from this page include:

• Featured articles at the top, catered to the user based on who they subscribe to and overall top stories

• Trending stories for that day, organized chronologically

• Ability to tap into different categories and explore latest audio articles

• Ability to explore a list of publishers to listen to or follow

• Discovering for content via a search bar with keywords. Keywords can trigger audio articles as well as publishers