Youcerto is a social podcasting platform built around a simple idea: listening doesn’t always have to be passive. Alongside podcasts, the product brought together related articles and live conversation rooms where people could discuss the subjects they were already exploring.
I led the redesign of the iOS experience, focusing on product strategy, research, user flows, interface design, and prototyping. The goal was to make discovery, listening, and participation feel like parts of one connected experience rather than separate features competing for attention.
I led the redesign of the iOS experience, focusing on product strategy, research, user flows, interface design, and prototyping. The goal was to make discovery, listening, and participation feel like parts of one connected experience rather than separate features competing for attention.
The platform had an interesting premise, but the experience didn’t fully support it. Podcasts, articles, and live conversations existed alongside one another, yet moving between them felt fragmented.
Research surfaced three recurring problems:
People understood the product’s value conceptually, but it wasn’t always clear where to begin or how the different features fit into their daily listening habits.
The redesign focused on making the experience easier to navigate, more familiar, and most importantly, more conversational.
I conducted surveys and interviews with existing users to understand their listening habits, discovery patterns, and how they moved between reading, listening, and participating in conversations.
The research suggested that people weren’t looking for another traditional podcast app. They were interested in an experience that felt more active and community-driven, but they still expected the familiarity of products like Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
That became an important design principle: Youcerto could introduce new social behaviors, but it shouldn’t require people to relearn how a podcast app works.
Familiar patterns would provide the foundation. Conversation and participation could build on top of them.
The platform needed to support two audiences: people listening to podcasts and the creators publishing or hosting them.
While both were important, I prioritized the listener experience first. Discovery and participation were central to making the platform feel active. If listeners could quickly find something relevant and join conversations around it, creating content on the platform would become more valuable over time.
This shifted the product away from an article-led structure and toward a conversation-first listening experience.
The redesign was organized around three practical questions:
These questions shaped the navigation, information architecture, and hierarchy of the experience.
Podcasts are often consumed while people are doing something else—commuting, driving, walking, or working. That meant the product needed to remain predictable when someone could only give it a few seconds of attention.
I storyboarded real-world scenarios, particularly commuting and in-car listening, to understand where the experience could become distracting or unnecessarily complicated.
This became a useful stress test for the navigation, playback controls, recommendations, and the way people switched between content. The interface needed to feel lightweight and understandable without requiring someone’s full attention (because the road should probably have most of that).
Before moving into visual design, I mapped the main user flows and relationships between the platform’s three content types:
Each type served a different purpose, but giving all three equal prominence quickly made the experience feel overwhelming.
I simplified the structure around a smaller set of primary actions: discovering something to listen to, joining a conversation, and moving between related content without losing context.
Early wireframes explored several navigation and layout models. The goal wasn’t to fit more features onto each screen. It was to reduce the distance between features that were meant to support one another.
Discovery was one of the clearest problems identified during research, so I redesigned onboarding around interests and topics.
Instead of sending everyone into the same generic feed, people could select the subjects they cared about during setup. Those choices shaped their initial podcast recommendations, conversations, and suggested rooms.
The process was intentionally lightweight. People could get to relevant content quickly and adjust their interests later without turning onboarding into a questionnaire.
This helped address the “empty platform” feeling that social products can create when someone first joins and nothing feels relevant yet.
The most complex part of the redesign was bringing podcasts, articles, and live discussions together without making the product feel like three apps sharing the same navigation.
I designed the podcast player as the central interaction point. From the player, people could listen to an episode, open related reading, discover active rooms, and join a live conversation connected to the topic.
This treated conversation as a continuation of listening rather than a separate destination.
It also reduced context switching. People could move from consuming content to discussing it without needing to understand where one part of the product ended and another began.
Research also showed that people wanted the ability to create podcasts and host conversations, but creation happened less frequently than listening.
Rather than giving creation permanent space in the primary navigation, I surfaced it contextually through onboarding, the home experience, and profile actions.
This kept the main navigation focused on the things people did most often while still making creation easy to find when it became relevant.
It was a small hierarchy decision, but an important one: availability didn’t always need to mean prominence.
The final prototype repositioned Youcerto as a conversation-driven listening experience centered on discovery, participation, and community.
Personalized onboarding made the first session more relevant. A simpler navigation model made the product easier to understand, while integrating articles and live rooms into the player created a more natural path from listening to participating.
The concept showed how several different content formats could support one another when they were organized around a shared behavior instead of presented as separate destinations.
Youcerto taught me that feature-rich products don’t become easier to use by giving every feature equal attention. The more a product can do, the more intentional its hierarchy needs to be.
The challenge wasn’t simply placing podcasts, articles, and voice rooms inside one interface. It was deciding how those systems should relate to one another so the experience felt connected rather than crowded.
It also reinforced how valuable familiar interaction patterns can be. People were more open to new social behaviors when the surrounding listening experience still felt recognizable, predictable, and easy to use.