The specifics of designing a product like Uncut
An open discussion with Nicholas Mandelbaum, Sr. Product Designer at Uncut.fm
Nicholas Mandelbaum, Senior Product Designer at uncut.fm
Carlos, CEO: "Can you share with us some of the specificities about designing a product like Uncut, which is audio first and quite a unique experience, due to the fact that podcasts are consumed in a very particular manner?"
Nicho, Sr. Product Designer: What makes Uncut’s design pretty challenging is the fact that we have to meet the needs of two different profiles at once: the host and the listeners’. While our creators are top of mind, designing the application for their audience is equally important. Every interaction we offer should be two things: a good medium of interaction for the listener, and a source of useful information for the host.
The other specificity of Uncut is time.
Unlike Clubhouse, everything happens asynchronously on Uncut. Listeners and creators are not gathered at a specific time to listen and participate in a pre-recorded episode. The goal is to design an experience that makes you feel like you're in tune with a crowd of listeners, just like a live show, but with the asynchrony and freedom that make podcasts such a popular medium. Not to mention we need to encourage listener engagement on the player itself, which represents a major shift away from traditional social media platforms.
Carlos: Internally, we recently came up with the concept of "Moments". Can you share this still very early framework we're trying to use?
Nicho: Listening to a podcast is all about the audio. Podcasts are a huge success because they are ubiquitous. You can take them with you almost anywhere. People listen to podcasts when they’re walking the dog, while they’re driving... So how can a user interface fit into this experience? How do you add interactivity without disrupting what makes podcasts such a cool medium — which is, not having to stare at a screen for once?
We are starting to get some answers.
We’re designing for four key moments of the listening experience.
Moment 1, Discover: This is the moment where you decide what you're going to listen to. With Uncut, you’re no longer making those choices alone, or based on brief reviews and ratings. You can now see who has listened to an episode, and what a simple sum of reactions reveals about the overall mood of a specific episode. Was it funnier than expected? Did the audience react? Were they angry or did they overwhelmingly approve? This quick, quantitative analysis helps you decide which of the flood of interesting podcasts will suit your current mood — before you listen. You can also find out which shows or episodes your social graph is listening. Chances are you have interests in common with them!
Moment 2, Listen: Uncut's listening experience is an augmented experience. It adds an additional “layer” to traditional apps. This means we first need to build a "normal" player, with all the expected features — skip, speed control, scrubbing, volume — and then add a social component on top of it. On the plus side, playing an audio file is fairly simple and offers more screen space than a video. This allows us to display additional content from the community, and encourage listener participation. We're still refining the mechanics of what we call the “campfire” at the top of the screen, but we know what we want to achieve: give the audience a sense of “togetherness” and let them sit around the host. Virtually, they can be a co-host for a given moment of the podcast! Being a co-host for a few minutes of your favorite podcast is a promising value proposition. This moment is also an opportunity to discover curated content — either from the host or the community. For passive listeners, who prefer to spend most of their time not looking at a screen, these special moments are the only additional content Uncut offers them. For the more active listeners, who aim to be seen and heard — and also for the curious — we have a third moment...
Moment 3, Participate: Engagement is critical here. Even if you only react once, with an emoji, during a two-hour podcast... it makes all the difference to the podcaster. Audience participation is the beginning of a host’s meaningful relationship with their audience — it’s the host’s opportunity to move from attention to trust. We try to make this as easy and obvious as possible by placing a call to action on the same level as the expected controls like volume, skip, search, volume control. Participating in a podcast is something completely new to listeners, so the functionality is designed to be simple and accessible. Recording an audio comment is no more difficult than sending an audio message on WhatsApp or recording a voice memo. Responding with an emoji is also a very simple action.
Moment 4, Explore. Currently under development, exploration is a moment that can occur during or after listening to an episode. It allows listeners to browse through all the reactions and find a specific moment, or a specific comment. It's a way for the active listener or host to go back over their comments and explore the threads created by other listeners. This is the most social part of the application, and it brings the listener closer to their show’s community. The corresponding user interface is under development right now, but what we can say that its MVP form will be a timeline of all the reactions and comments, which you can browse or watch live as they unfold. Since exploration time occurs after listening, this is an opportunity to extend the Uncut experience. Maybe we suggest episodes to the listener with a similar emotional tone, for example (automatic playlist?)