Onboarding New Podcast Users

Designing in-app education

Client

Wistia is an easy-to-use platform that helps B2B Marketers turn videos and podcasts into marketing machines.

The Challenge

As we prepared to launch podcast features into beta, I hosted and joined qualitative usability interviews. These calls made it clear: users weren't sure how to get their podcast listed on popular listening apps like Spotify.

They could set up their show and upload episodes, but a majority of users assumed any content they uploaded would automatically appear on Spotify, Apple, and other listening apps.

One of my primary goals in my career is to advocate for the customer's attention – and the current experience was leading to complex support threads, painful-to-watch Fullstory sessions.

My Role

With results from the usability study, Fullstory sessions, and support anecdotes, I was able to advocate for building an onboarding experience for podcast creation. I was responsible for researching and testing the setup process, mapping the user flows and wireframing possible solutions in Whimsical, creating mocks for review in Sketch, taking those to a high-fidelity prototype for review in Marvel, and handing-off the design for development using Abstract.

Defining Problems to Solve

To kick off this project, I drafted a 1-pager identifying the requirements for a successful podcast and the gaps in our flow where user's could get stuck.

User Flow
One of the most important decisions in this process was to nest the checklist within the left navigation menu, under 'Podcast Settings'. This was important because the majority of current Wistia users didn't have active podcasts, and we didn't want them to feel like podcast distribution was required to have a successful Channel. This choice made the checklist easy to ignore for folks who who weren't concerned with podcasting, but always available for those looking to distribute a podcast.

Solution

For the final design, I landed on a podcast setup checklist that served as a reference for users who needed help distributing their podcast.

Here's a short video showing how users could reference to the checklist, and what it looks like when all actions are complete:

 
    ← Head back home