iOS 11 Podcasts App Usability

In previous versions of the Music and Podcasts App in iOS, the default behaviors enabled the user to very quickly get thier content playing without much effort up front, or maintenence effort. This was effective for hands-free situations, such as a workout, doing yard work, bicycling, driving, and others. Hitting play in control center or the App would resume where you left off, and continue through the unplayed content without user intervention.


When the new Music app arrived a few years ago, the focus on Apple Music as a service changed the behavior, removing some of this functionality entirely, and hiding other parts of it, requiring many actions and visits to unintuitive and unexplained parts of the UI to facilitate playing a playlist of music that is wholly owned and downloaded to the device already. The shuffle function didn't even appear for the listing for Downloaded Music, so each selected song played once and stopped, without naturally traversing to the next song in the list. It appeared that the focus on the new music subscription service was so great that the essential job of the Music app—the ones that made it effective especially in the user contexts recieving attention in other areas—was actually severely downgraded, and went from simple and graceful to frustrating, obtuse, and ineffective at just playing the music. Thankfully, the last revision to the Music app restored enough of what was—if you know where to look for it—to at least get its job back.


in iOS 11, many of the built-ins have deliberately adopted the style of Apple Music—a vaguely music magazine style presentation which is passable visually but a bit wasteful with premium screenspace on handheld devices, and features a font which lacks the elegence of the previous system font—and with the style, also comes the curious disregard for the basic functionality of the app especially with regard to the features it already had that support new focii currently being discussed and added and extended in other contexts: particularly hands-free use.


Podcasts now plays a single podcast, then stops. There is no facility in settings or the app itself to make it play a chain of podcasts. In order to trigger that podcast, you have to drill down into it. On the plus side, clicking a podcast episide presents the user with an extended description of the episode, which is nice. However, doing this is required just to play a single podcast, and it appears that in order to play more than one podcast at a time, for example, on the way to work, biking, working out, driving...the user must select each podcast episode and pop it onto the up next list. A user who is accustomed to just grabbing his or her phone and getting into the car, hitting play and putting the phone down to commute 1 hour to work is likely going to find themselves fiddling with their phone 3 minutes later, to try to trigger the next unplayed podcast. Asking Siri to play the next podcast generally fails silently. The solution that appears to be the intention of the designer is, the user before work must select the podcasts they want to play and add them to Up Next before leaving for work, and then at work before leaving work for the ride home...every single day.


With other areas recieving attention for hands free enhancement, how did the most basic version of it get removed from the most popular apps used in those contexts? The use cases that made the iPod and the iPhone so useful seem to have had a hit taken out on them by the mob. I read a preview of the Podcasts app by one of the Apple focused tech sites that said that the Listen Now tab in Podcasts is an upgraded version of the last versions Unplayed tab. That reviewer must never have used the app. Having to select each podcast episode, drill in, and select Play is laughably bad, and potentially dangerous. To add to that, once an episode is complete, the user doesn't even get crickets. They have to pick up the phone, back out of the played episode to get back to Listen Now, skip over the one they just played, select the next one to drill into it, and press Play. Hopefully they don't listen to a lot of Spoken Editions, because those are often 2 to 3 minutes long.


I read the release notes for the betas, fully expecting a message about the podcasts app not being complete, but there wasn't one. Does the team responsible for this have a design theory they can share with us that clarifies the decisions they've made with these apps lately and helps explain how they are intending they be used? Is the assumption that the user always has the phone screen up to thier face, or that the user should prepare thier podcasts Up Next list twice a day because the Beats guys think this is cute?

Replies

completely ruined the app

I also can't find the Podcast History. This was incredibly helpful for me to go back and find important information in an episode. Hate the new design. So ugly.

Too bad there’s no rating for the Apple apps, otherwise they’d get a lot of 1-star ratings and maybe actually start listening to the users of the app instead of just doing whatever they believe is right. Breaking frequently used features (or switching them off and hiding them where almost no one would go looking for them) is just no way to treat your customers.

This is REALLY BAD. The app becomes almost unusable for its most common use case - DRIVING!!


Please bring back auto play.

I agree, this app is terrible. I wish I could get back previous version.

Changes I would like:

- One Click Playback

- Play eposides in sequense automatically

- Add a global settings

- Add Sort by oldest date

- Add List view in shows

- Separate Subscribed and Non-Subscribed shows

Another thing on the User Experience side ... iOS 11 basically gives you the ability to Add podcast to the Queue and Sort Podcast within the queue. But you cannot remove a podcast from the queue (short of removing the podcast from the library & redownload).

Like many things, when they make these choices for the Beats guys, they need to remember to add a switch for the Pro guys to keep the old behavior. Why not just have new episodes drop into the queue if a switch is selected? Programmatically its an automation of the Play Later feature so it's not even new technology that needs to be figured out. Hey, if Siri was so smart, why didn't it notice that's my behavior? Call it Auto-Queue and everyone would be happy, or maybe it needs to be Air Queue for the Beats guys??


Here's a new idea, priorities on the subscribed podcasts? New episodes of Podcast A (priority high) and Podcast B (priority medium) - Podcast A queues first. Also not crazy tech, but the kind of innovation I expected from Apple and do not see.


Here's another crazy one... why isnt there a friggin separate Podcasts app for Mac? I have to load the iTunes behemoth to do what a tiny few MB app can do? C'mon guys... where's the love for the Pro users?!

I agree entirely with this post and it still applies in the full ios11 release. It outlines my exact thoughts on these two apps. Apple, please update podcasts (like you did with music) to at least allow some functionality back in. Most importantly adding back autoplay and cleaning up the navigation. It is difficult to navigate down in the weeds to "available episodes" to see which I have listened to.

>still applies in the full ios11 release.


As iOS 11 is now public, user-centric queries/comments such as this are perhaps best put to Apple's public community support forums, run by AppleCare, and/or Apple's twitter support account, vs. risking off-topic here in the DevForums, thanks and good luck.


https://support.apple.com/


Users can feedback via http://www.apple.com/feedback/- Individuals using betas are free to use the Feedback Assistant; devs can use the 'Report Bugs' link, below right.



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Tags: off-topic thread

I second this, in my eyes the lastest version of the podcast app is broken. Looking for a replacement app.

I guess we all agree on this downgrade in functionality, but I want to add something more to the wishlist: why not have algorithmic podcast suggestions even in the grid or somewhere in the brows area instead of the classical so called "Featured" items?