AUDIO IN APP • The Washington POSt
Role at The Washington Post: Leading design for the discovery and story experiences on the Native App. This work aims to increase user engagement on the app and enable our users to build habitual behaviors. On this project, lead designer for several iterations of the audio experience on The Washington Post app.
View prototype of the most recent audio iteration.
The Washington Post app is a crucial part of not only our suite of digital products which help to build habits with The Washington Post journalism, but also our subscription strategy.
We’ve built immersive multimedia experiences, modernizing the design to boost engagement, and elevated our personalization experience in the app. In each of these areas, our efforts have been aligned on driving habit development within the app, which is our key metric (# of users with 2+ visits/week).
The Washington Post app is for subscribers who want The Post in their pocket - no matter where you are in your day. We’ll be the first app you open when there’s breaking news, or when you have a few minutes to play the latest Keyword on your lunch break. Whether you are reading The 7 after you wake up, listening to a playlist of stories while walking the dog, or learning to make the latest viral recipe, our app will help you stay connected with the best of The Post wherever your day takes you. Unlike many of our competitors, our app will provide everything you love from The Post in one convenient app, as part of one subscription.
As audio playback is a much smoother experience on app than web, we have oriented many audio features towards app-first mentality, including player enhancements, play listing and voice controls. For subscribers, the goal is to get them to download the app, build daily habits with our product and continue their subscription.
We know from previous research that audio usage is strongly correlated to higher engagement and more frequent return visits, so we made a major investment in that track of work this year. We launched curated playlists within the app in a special “Listen to The Post section.” We also added support for Human Read audio, to support the highlighting of personalities in our newsroom. Almost immediately, users began asking for the ability to create their own playlists. That work is underway and will launch later this summer. Following the team’s audio investments, engagement among audio article users has increased by 17%. New Listen to the Post landing page has gotten roughly 32,000 views in the last 30 days.
Based on user feedback, there is a common pain-point among some users preferring to read an article instead of consuming media (audio articles, videos, podcasts). In the latest iteration of the audio work (launching December 2023), updates will be made to the audio player to clean up the visual design, make it more intuitive for users to read articles and access their playlist.
