Smartphone, tablet and CarPlay audio apps for Economist original content. Freemium content model for new users with subscriber tie-in. Wide array of content types with categorisation, tagging, chapter markers and a large back-catalogue. Customisable subscription feed and topic following functionality.
The Economist already had their podcast/audio content available a via web service, but wanted to explore branching out into native apps. Currently the content was exclusive to members which is a great bonus for subscribers who find it, but does not help convert users to paid memberships and the web player is a less accessible medium for audio content.
The brief was to explore a new Economist radio player that provided a superior experience to members, whilst allowing non-members to sample media and upsell them a subscription. The challenge was in delivering a UX to browse multiple episodes of multiple shows, that were broken into chapters, some of which were freemium, the rest subscription only.
Show formats varied in length and structure with a categorisation system that allows subscribed users to only download chapters of shows of particular topics, building a custom edited experience for each subscribers interests.
The UI was designed to be flexible across phone and tablet with adaptable layouts that utilise the screen space for each size, and an accompanying Apple Carplay and Android Auto app experience.
The project unfortunately came to a close during a time of internal reorganisation at The Economist. The project in this form, did not progress past prototyping as the company restructured and the project was de-prioritised. It never launched as a standalone app, but features developed here informed a later integration of audio content into the main Economist news app. It was still immensely enjoyable to work on and presented some challenging UX Design problems to overcome.
Product team of 5, and a design team of 2.