Podcast clips 💡

4 year(s) ago

One of the ideas that came out of my failed 100 Days of Design project was Podcast Clips - an idea that scratches my own itch (well as much as you can for 30 minutes in the morning).

The problem

I listen to a lot of podcasts, some of them are true crime from the likes of Sword and Scale or Swindled, others are fun 'just chatting' podcasts like my own: Threaders Podcast.

But, I also love to listen to non-fiction podcasts that I can learn from such as Design Review or Business Wars. I often have these things playing as I'm doing other things (walking the dog or cooking) and when there is something I want to remember I need to remember the time of the podcast or stop what I'm doing and open up the link or open my notes app.

Framing the problem as a design challenge

So since this was a 100 Day Project, I committed around 30 minutes each morning to work on an idea so I want to frame this as a design challenge as quickly as possible and run with an idea to spend more time creating a solution rather than refine and validate the problem (this is just for me, it's fun and fast).

The easiest way to do this is to create a How Might We statement: How might we make it easier for people to save and revisit interesting parts of a podcast they are listening to?

Exploring

I took a look at some podcast apps or searched for some inspiration on how people trim and save parts of videos or sounds.

From there I took my design problem and jumped into sketching some concepts (using my own printable sketch sheets). I'm moving quickly so this is the easiest way to move fast and pick the best idea that solves our problem quickly.

wireframe sketches exploring the idea and how it might work

Once I have a rough idea, I want to start to increase the fidelity and start to put the screens together.

wireframe sketches exploring the idea and how it might work

Proposal

Once I'm happy with the idea, it's time to put it into a figma prototype and work out some of the smaller interactions.

This is the overall idea: a podcast player that lets you quickly grab short snippets of a podcast and save some notes for each so you can refer back to it later when you have time (or maybe share it with someone else).

Summary

There are lots of things to iron out and refine, for a 30-minute design challenge though I think this is a pretty cool idea that scratches my own itch.

For the overall idea, I like being able to clip a part podcast but there would need to be work on how you organise and actually use these (the feature itself wouldn't be enough to make this useful).