New year, new Breaker

Today we are very excited to launch a brand new Home screen!

Emma Lundin
Breaker
3 min readJan 8, 2019

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Since Breaker is a podcast listening app with great discovery possibilities, we wanted to make the browsing experience even better. With inspiration from apps like Netflix and YouTube among others, we wanted Breaker to move away from subscriptions and focus more on social and personalized discovery.

Design sprint and process

We started last year by having a weeklong design sprint where we created prototypes and interviewed users about what was most important to them.

Some of the findings from this design sprint were:

  • Users like to see a preview of the episode (show name, episode title, description, number of likes and comments)
  • Users like to browse episodes based on categories
  • Users like to get personalized recommendations based on their likes and listening activity
  • Users like to discover episodes based on their friends’ likes and listening activity
  • Users like to discover episodes based on the duration of the episode

Next, we got help from our other designer, Josh Williams, who created mockups of a redesign.

These mockups were later applied to our current design theme, and this is what the end result looks like:

This home screen design is more extensible, allowing us to easily add more categories and sections over time. The home screen currently contains ten sections: Featured episode (based on your listening activity), New from subscriptions, Continue listening, Popular with friends, Recommended for you, Under 20 minutes, Categories (based on your subscriptions), and Premium episodes.

Where did my playlist go?

Some of you might wonder, “Where is my playlist?” Don’t worry, your playlist is not gone! We’ve just moved it into the new “Library” tab where you can also find your Subscriptions and Downloads.

New Library tab with Playlist, Subscriptions, and Downloads

We’re hoping users will now discover episodes from the home screen in addition to the playlist. Moreover, we have added the ability to download episodes from the home screen, which will show up in Downloads.

Based on early feedback, users love the new design!

Matt Hartman, an early beta tester, wrote to us:

“I found a random Product Hunt podcast episode I liked which surfaced because someone I follow, Sar, favorited it. I think I was likely to click on it because, even though it was an unfamiliar image of a podcast, I know Sar.”

We also received feedback on Twitter:

We will be testing and tweaking this design to make it perfect for you! If you’d like to test out upcoming Breaker features, you can sign up for our TestFlight beta program. You can also email us at feedback@breaker.audio with your thoughts on the new home. We love hearing feedback from our users!

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