About
My last project at Wistia as product designer was to design a new audio player to support the company's shift into podcasting. Our goal was to ship a powerful, embeddeable audio player with rich podcasting features — all without sacrificing the simplicity and elegance of Wistia's much-admired video player.
Details of various podcast player states
Challenges
One of the key challenges we faced as a product team working on the audio player was figuring out how to balance simplicity and density of content — all within a constrained UI and a limited amount of time. Compared to Wistia's video player, the new audio player would need to account for a major increase in metadata (show details, description, transcript, etc.) and new, audio-specific controls. Through near-daily working sessions with developers, I mapped out the layout of the player at different breakpoints and established how functionality would be introduced as the player grew in size.
Info sheet on player behavior at different breakpoints