App Dissection - Dropout.TV

First research phase

After an initial analysis of the application, I noted that navigating through the content on the home page to find specific content was challenging. Looking at competitors, such as YouTube or Disney+, I further remarked that they implemented a tab system to facilitate searching through large quantities and varieties of video content.

With this initial UX hypothesis in mind, I crafted an interview guide for brief, semi-structured interviews. Finding participants from the target demographic that were pre-existing users of the platform proved challenging, and ultimately only one individual from the sample I reached out to was able to participate in this first round of interviews. I conducted a 20-minute in-person interview with this individual, and after conducting a tagging analysis I was able to craft a persona, empathy map, and journey map to qualitatively determine key user challenges.

Through this process, my initial hypothesis that the primary pain points of Dropout’s user experience was navigation through a large content library was positively reinforced. A number of the challenges that the first interviewee encountered were characterised by an unaccustomedness with scrolling mechanisms on a mobile phone, a lack of familiarity with basic icons, and a reluctance to engage with features they deemed unfamiliar as a result of an alienating relationship with technology. This came to a head when attempting to address these concerns through how might we questions and user flows, where it became clear that these navigational challenges were baked into every element of the application, bloating the scope of the project and ultimately obscured actionable changes for the target demographic, which would be familiar with common digital interactions such as scrolling and search functionalities.

Despite the aforementioned challenges, I didn’t give up. I cast a wider net in my search for interviewees and was able to find 2 additional participants from which I developed 2 personas that fit within the application’s target demographic. The first interview that inspired Audio Alyssa was conducted over the phone for 45-minute duration, working with the same semi-structured interview guide from the first phase. Through an analysis of the user journey of this persona, I was able to find a clear pain point relating to a lack of optimization for enjoying long-form content on the platform in an audio-only player, leading to the clear how might we question of “How might we improve the audio-only experience on mobile?”

From this point, I was able to conduct a competitive analysis with out-of-the-box competitors, such as Spotify and Apple Podcasts, to familiarize myself with the core elements of audio-based user experiences.

After engaging in brainstorming exercises, such as Crazy 8s, I created preliminary sketches to conceptualize what the player would look and function like.

After episode selection, the application produces the episode landing that features key information such as the title, the episode length, and the ability to return to the episode list of a given season. Additionally, to capitalize on user familiarity with social media and personal connection to specific cast members, I added featured tags to allow individuals to more easily search for content with key terms and featured cast members through prominent image-based tagging. Additionally, from this page users can add the episode to their watchlist or download the episode for later viewing.

Upon pressing play (or resume if they had already begun listening to that episode), the application would produce the player, with new features such as an episode queue that additionally indicates the download status of following episodes, a sleep timer that is immersively themed and pauses the player after a designated period of inactivity, and the ability to adjust playback speed through a speedometer graphic.

Users can also share the episode with their digital community with customizable episode cards that can be published directly to a number of social media platforms, expanding Dropout.TV’s audience reach.