Product Design Challenge #2: Improving Podcasts on Spotify

Improving the experience of listening to podcasts for paid Spotify users

👋 Welcome to the Product Design Challenge: Every month, you’ll receive a realistic product design challenge to work on your skills, including product thinking, UX design, research, and prototyping. You can use it purely for practice purposes or even as a portfolio case study. If you don’t want to receive the monthly challenge you can manage your preferences in your account settings.

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Scenario

You are working as a product designer for Spotify in the podcast team. Your team comprises a product manager, a front-end engineer, a back-end engineer, and a user researcher.

Intro

Improving retention for paid subscriptions is one of the company’s most important objectives for this year.

Data & Key Considerations:

• The team has decided to invest more in podcasts to increase engagement and retention.

• Users who listen to podcasts on Spotify retain 24% more at 6 months than users who don’t.

• Currently, users on a paid plan don’t get any added benefit when listening to podcasts.

• Engineers in your team have been playing around with the OpenAI API and are open to trying options that use Generative AI for new ideas and features.

Goal

• Identify some key opportunities/features to improve the podcast experience on Spotify to increase usage and retention for paid subscriptions.

• (Optional) Interview 1-2 people in your local network who listen to podcasts on Spotify or other apps to identify their biggest challenges.

• (Optional) Sketch some of these ideas on a piece of paper.

• Pick one of these ideas and design a high-fidelity prototype on Figma.

Hints

• Take inspiration from other podcast apps; what key features provide high engagement? Try putting together your inspiration and references in your Figma or Figjam file.

• You can choose to do this exercise on the mobile or desktop app.

• You can explore options that use Generative AI or not; it’s entirely up to you.

• You can use openly available Figma libraries such as this one for desktop or this one for mobile.

• Alternatively, if you would like to practice your UI design skills, try recreating the Spotify UI from scratch.

💡 Retention is a challenging metric to track, as you can only see the results of a product update after time. How can you use more short-term product metrics to evaluate how successful you are?

Sharing your work

This is an internal exercise, but sharing your work is recommended. You can share your process and output in the comment section (by adding a note) if you’d like to openly get feedback from the Designary community or simply share it internally with your team and peers.

Recommended tools

• Pen & Paper for sketching and ideation

• Figjam or Miro for noting down your thinking & problem definition

• Figma for mockups and prototypes

This challenge will help you with

• Product thinking

• Business thinking

• UI Design

• UX Design

• Prototyping

Disclaimer

This challenge's scenario, data, and content are purely conceptual and for educational purposes. There is no affiliation with the companies portrayed.

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