An audio learning podcast player app that educate users about money management and areas like investments and finance
Background
People with diverse backgrounds wish to learn and educate themselves about how to manage their money, whether personal finances or their business finances.
Investcast, a smart podcast player app introduces you to the best conversations about money management and investments.The app features personalized curations depending on your areas of interest and your level of financial knowledge. Thus, creating smart recommendations and providing delightful experience.
Contribution
User Research, UX Design, Visual Design, Information Architecture, Prototyping
Methodology
Lean UX approach, Human-centred design methodology
Tools
Process
User Research
Desk Research
User Interviews
Affinity Mapping
Synthesis
Journey Mapping
Ideation
Prototyping
Wireframes
High fidelity Designs
Iteration
User Testing
Product improvements
User Research
Understanding Demographics
Desk research was carried out to understand various characteristics and interests of our target audiences.
Essentially, it helped us to explore the important aspects that we need to address and focus on while designing our digital product. The examined areas were-
The age group that desires interest in financial literacy and in which other related fields.
Needs, behaviours & preferences of podcast listeners
Competitor Analysis
I personally interacted with popular podcast apps available in the market to recognize various features and nuances of app that provides an amazing and desirable experience.
These competitor findings helped to plan out the aim for user interviews-
Podcast discoverability: To understand how difficult is to discover likeable podcasts among tons of them.
Note-taking feature: How users keep a record of what they learned from podcasts.
Play controls: To recognize the level of playback controls they use while listening podcasts in different environment
User Interviews
To gain a broader understanding of experiences of podcast listeners, I conducted five semi-structured interviews of young Australians who were interested in learning about finance & related topics at some level as well as listen to podcast occasionally.
User perspective summary-
Insight #1: Discovering suitable podcasts is quite a tedious experience
Insight #2: Note-taking affordance to listeners in situations where they are interacting with devices and not hands-free
Insight #3: Importance of user control & access over their favorite, subscribed podcasts
Insightful quotes by participants-
"trending podcast list doesn't work for me when I look for new podcasts. It's kind of frustating to listen whole new episodes, just to find that it's not that interesting"- Jack
"difficult to find the episode or navigate to favourite podcast show in this app"- Neha
"there are times when a question pops in my mind while listening to episodes, and normally I would use mobile notes app to save it and search it online afterwards"- Amy
Affinity Mapping
The app could increase user engagement by providing an easy to use app for different spectrums of personal needs. Below are the three themes that related to the most users:
Easy usability
Users will continue to use the app that cater all the needs with all the controls they wish to use in different situations like while travelling, cooking, etc.
Note-taking affordance
A feature that lets users keep a record of what they learned from podcasts or if they want to search it online afterwards.
Podcast discoverability
To make discovering likeable podcasts a pleasant experience.
Synthesize
Having clearly identified the user needs and motivations, I represented the research findings in form of persona and customer journey mapping. This synthesis helped me to guide throughout the ideation and prototyping phase of UX design process.
MVP
The analysis from user & market research helped to condense the information into following promising features :-
Minimal design with perceived playback controls
Ensuring that content and visual design is focused on the essentials. Users will have desirable experience that cater all the needs with all the controls they wish to use in different situations and environment
Brief summaries of every episode in podcast selection
Ensuring that content and visual design is focused on the essentials. Users will have desirable experience that cater all the needs with all the controls they wish to use in different situations and environment
Note taking affordance
Prototyping
Wireframes
I visualized interactions that Amy (persona) would have with the Investcast app. This gave me reference points to start wireframing her whole experience.
Mobile Prototype
© 2024 Mayank Chhabra