Product Update #2
What's new in product this week?
Quick Reminder: At Uncut.fm, we are committed to deepening engagement with podcasts by connecting hosts directly with their listeners — Our multiplayer format breaks down the barriers between hosts and their audience. It's a home base where podcast hosts can build community around their content and receive valuable feedback and qualitative data on an episode by episode level.
Our latest release marks the beginning of our transition to a new and overall better user experience. Namely, we've completely rethought how to organize functionalities in the player.
The first step was to rethink how audio comments get displayed while an episode plays. This new design replaces our "Campfire" and will allow us, in the very near future, to focus the central part of the player on whatever a show host wants to put forward or display for their listeners in order to "augment" their episode. More on that in a later release note!
We also added some more advanced controls for the player to finish what we had started in the previous release. It took us more time than expected because as we found out the hard way: Mo Controls, Mo Problems. Audio on the web with browser and device diversity is just jolly. Just ask our Engineering team ;-)
As always and in full transparency here is the link to our new Release Note. Also, let us know if you want to join our community of BETA testers and get your hands dirty spotting bugs and giving us feedback.
New Features Include:
Adjustable playing speed
It turns out we don't all listen to podcasts at 1x speed! We want to make sure you don't have to change your listening habits too much just to listen to episodes on Uncut. You can now choose your playback speed (1, 1.25, 1.5... all the up way to 2x.) Just don't blaze through these episodes too fast or you'll miss all the good stuff. Unfortunately, this is not available on Safari desktop.
View comments while playing
We had big hopes for our Campfire idea but we might have gotten a little bit ahead of ourselves. Whoopsies. Turns out we wanted it to solve too many problems at once. So we went back to the drawing board.
Because listening to a podcast is generally a "passive" activity, most listeners won't be actively watching a screen while they listen. Even if they are actively observing the screen, most users want to finish listening to a part of the episode before checking out the comments. When a listener does return their attention to the screen, it takes time — to drop what they are doing, get to their device, unlock it, open the correct app — and the comment may no longer be in focus. The one thing we noticed is a listener will generally have a rough idea of how long ago an episode piqued their interest.
With our new approach to comments, you will see a counter of elapsed comments. When expanded, this counter will display a full list of comments relative to the current playing time in reverse chronological order. We've also grouped and labeled them to give listeners a sense of relative time in order to easily find relevant comments.
Volume Control
This is small one but since we're not control freaks ourselves, every little bit helps when it comes to giving YOU more control. You can now adjust the volume of your episode independently of your device's volume. The only bummer here is that iOS doesn't allow us to let you switch from whisper to full on blasting (aka it's not available on iOS.)
Carlos Diaz - Co-Founder and CEO