Audio Player: An end-to-end mobile app audio feature

Role

Product Designer co-leading strategy, research, and design execution.

Why this mattered

Audiobooks were becoming a core learning format for O’Reilly customers, but the rushed launch created a poor experience that directly impacted user satisfaction, retention, and content completion.

The Opportunity

Audiobooks were launched through the existing video player, which created immediate user frustration, session drop-offs, and growing technical debt. The team needed a mobile-first audio experience that aligned with user expectations and O’Reilly’s goals for engagement and learning outcomes.

Strategy

I worked with the mobile app team to flush out a strategy that centered on aligning urgent user pain points with O’Reilly’s broader business goals for engagement, retention, and learning outcomes.

  • Start with user truth by analyzing reviews, analytics, and affinity-mapped patterns.

  • Focus the MVP on the highest-impact needs: background playback, offline downloads, chapter navigation, variable speeds, and a mini-player.

  • Maintain cross-platform parity across iOS, Android, tablets, and dark mode.

  • Validate early through A and B testing based on real listening scenarios.

  • Launch in phases so users gained value immediately while development continued.

Key Contributions

  • Co-led product decisions from research to launch, shaping a clear direction rooted in user and business needs.

  • Identified core experience failures through deep review analysis and synthesized insights into actionable priorities.

  • Helped define and prioritize the five MVP must-haves and guided feature trade-offs based on feasibility.

  • Drove two rounds of diverge and converge exploration that shaped the hierarchy, UI direction, and an early component library aligned to O’Reilly’s design system.

  • Led usability testing with 16 participants across two prototype variations and synthesized A and B test results to validate navigation and controls.

  • Delivered comprehensive cross-platform handoff documentation to preserve design intent across iOS, Android, tablets, and dark mode.

  • Supported a staggered release strategy that launched the core player first and the mini-player immediately after to increase early user value.

  • Created post-launch measurement documentation using Amplitude and FullStory to track adoption, session duration, and completion behavior.

Outcome

  • 150% increase in audiobook downloads and consumption.

  • 2x app usage increase across iOS and Android within the first two quarters.

  • All five MVP features successfully delivered, with future enhancements like bookmarking and sleep timer roadmapped by this foundation.

What Was Learned

  • Clear goals keep projects aligned and protect the MVP.
    Defining requirements early prevented scope creep, kept the team focused on the highest-impact features, and ensured the release solved the immediate problems users were facing.

  • Engineering collaboration is essential for feasibility and scale.
    Consistent conversations with iOS and Android engineers clarified backend limitations, shaped decisions around what could ship, and strengthened parity across platforms. This partnership ensured the design system stayed intact while still accommodating technical constraints.

  • Asking the right questions drives better decisions.
    Probing for clarity with stakeholders, engineers, and my design partner minimized assumptions and aligned everyone around a shared understanding of the experience we were building. This sharpened decision-making throughout the project.

  • Backend realities heavily influence the roadmap.
    The need for foundational updates postponed bookmarking until after launch. This reinforced the importance of understanding system limitations early so design decisions remain grounded and realistic.

  • Future-state thinking has value even in fast-paced cycles.
    While the MVP delivered immediate improvements, exploring long-term concepts earlier would have helped leadership visualize how the audio experience could continue to evolve.

  • Strong documentation accelerates development.
    Handoff documentation that mirrored decisions already made in collaboration with engineering reduced back-and-forth and preserved design intent across two platforms, tablets, and dark mode.

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