WORK / AUDIO TAB

Project summary 🗒️

OBJECTIVE

To increase weekly active users by enhancing the discoverability and return engagement of audio offerings for subscribers.

RESPONSIBILITIES

I played a key role throughout the project, from defining the problem and conducting user provocations to designing, collaborating with engineers, and testing builds for quality assurance.

METRICS

We observed a 5% increase in weekly active listeners, a 9% rise in weekly audio sessions, and a 7% growth in overall app weekly active users.

Users who listen to at least one article in a week on the app have 28% more total sessions-per-week than users who read at least one article in the same week.

THE PROBLEM

Subscribers struggle to find audio stories and return to them consistently.

HYPOTHESIS

Centralizing The New Yorker’s audio features in an easily accessible space will boost engagement among regular listeners, stimulate curiosity among readers, and cultivate new routine listeners. Simplifying the discovery and return process for audio content in the app will increase weekly active users and retention.

Starting with UX research 🔬

DESIGN PROVOCATION

In the initial stages of the project, we conducted UX research to shape our packaging strategy. We presented users with three prototypes, exploring different methods of packaging audio: by mood, by length, and by topic.

FINDINGS

Topic emerged as the primary driver influencing users' decisions on what to listen to.

Focused design exploration 🧭

With user input from the research, I had a clearer framework for design explorations.

SPECIFIC AREA OF FOCUS

Show the reader something great that they can listen to right now.
Help listeners return to stories they’ve started or show interest in.
Assist listeners in navigating to something specific that they know they’ll love.

HERO EXPLORATIONS

Show the reader something great that they can listen to right now.

CONTINUE LISTENING EXPLORATIONS

Help listeners return to stories they’ve started or shown interest in.

CATEGORIES EXPLORATIONS

Assist listeners in navigating to something specific that they know they’ll love.

Usability testing 📲

We assigned users tasks and observed  their attempts to perform them to determine successful and unsuccessful elements.

HYPOTHESIS TESTED

Audio story cards should support two user  needs—the primary action to play the narrated story and the secondary action to provide additional contextual information before deciding to listen.

FINDINGS

Nearly all users expressed the need to see a summary and the length of a story before deciding to listen.

The final product ✨

I adjusted the designs based on the usability testing feedback and I considered stakeholder input to make further refinements.

In the development phase, I collaborated closely with engineers, walking them through design specifications, writing user stories, determining feature prioritization, and conducting visual quality assurance tests on builds before launch.

TEAM

Product Designer - Charlie Carlo
Content Designer - Danielle Vargas
Design Lead - Steven Striegel
Product Manager - Shankar Ganesh
Engineers - Sawant Kumar, Arvind Pandey, Arjun Gururajan
UX Researcher - Claire Gutermuth
Editorial Collaborator - Julia Rothchild

CASE STUDIES