Designing the Play-Portal and admin UI for Whooshkaa
Overview —
Whooshkaa is an Australian-based tech startup that offers an all-in-one solution for hosting, managing, distributing, promoting and commercialising podcasts. In this project, the goal was to upgrade the Play Portal to enable enterprise level P&C (People and Culture) teams to distribute exclusive, on-demand content to their teams to provide a more flexible, personalised, and scalable solution to employee onboarding, training, development, and communication.
Problem statement
P&C teams need an easy way to create and distribute tailored content to different audience segments (new hires, specific departments, individuals) and reduce overwhelm compared to traditional onboarding methods like lengthy documents or zoom meetings / live presentations.
The goal of the Private Play Portal was to offer P&C teams a more dynamic and engaging way to:
- Improve the onboarding experience for new employees and foster ongoing employee engagement by delivering content that supported their growth and development via personalised audio content.
- Simplify the distribution of live and recorded content, such as Town Hall meetings, to ensure that employees had flexible access to important communications.
Mission statement
Validate the product concept, ensuring that it meets the needs of enterprise customers while delivering a smooth and intuitive experience for both employers and employees.
Read the full case study below, including snapshots of the product design process, artefacts and deliverables.
My contribution
UX research Design thinking User Interface design
The team
1 × chief technology officer 1 × chief marketing officer 1 × product designer
Date
2022
Process —
The first step was to gain a deep understanding of the unique challenges faced by P&C teams in large organisations and to gather insights from employees about their preferences for learning and development content. We engaged an enterprise level alpha customer to test our hypotheses.
Understanding customer sentiment and pain points.
Stakeholder interviews
- We conducted interviews with P&C leaders and team managers to understand their onboarding and employee development processes, pain points, and engagement strategies. This helped us to define core use cases for the Play Portal.
Employee surveys
- We distributed surveys to employees to gauge how they consumed content during their onboarding, what formats they found most engaging, and how they preferred to access development resources.
Competitor analysis
- We analysed existing solutions that companies were using to distribute onboarding and employee engagement content, focusing on their limitations and opportunities for differentiation.
Key insights
Employees increasingly preferred audio content for flexibility and ease of consumption during commutes or breaks, and P&C teams wanted to break down barriers to entry.
Armed with research insights, we moved into the testing and prototyping phase. Our goal was to validate our initial design hypotheses, focusing on ease of use for P&C teams and engagement for employees. We created mid-fidelity wireframes and static prototypes to map out key features
Usability testing
We walked P&C teams through the playlist creation process. Testing revealed that while the playlist creation feature was intuitive, users needed more support in the content tagging process to ensure that content was easy to find and distribute to teams. We explored a simple tagging system and potential tag-recommendations based on the user’s past behaviour.
We simulated an onboarding journey for employees where they accessed company-specific content from a private playlist. Employees appreciated the ability to consume content at their own pace, however feedback indicated that there was an opportunity for surfacing additional content recommendations. Based on this, we explored content recommendations, allowing the system to suggest content based on role, department, and past listening habits.
Outcome —
The Play Portal project provided invaluable insights into how enterprise People & Culture teams could leverage audio content to enhance employee onboarding and engagement.
Through user research and prototyping, we identified unique product opportunities around personalised content delivery, and the potential to integrate live-streaming with on-demand audio. These features presented clear value for enterprises looking to modernize their internal communications and employee development strategies. However, despite the significant progress and potential of the Play Portal, the project was ultimately shelved following Whooshkaa’s acquisition by Spotify (as the focus shifted towards integrating Whooshkaa's core technology into Spotify's broader podcasting ecosystem). The project remains a valuable learning experience, demonstrating the immense potential of audio solutions in enterprise settings.