Vox iOS app

Vox app with news, podcasts and video all in one place

I worked on the MVP for a Vox app that includes access to Vox news, podcasts and video. The goal of the app was to provide a premium experience for subscribers, specifically ad-free podcasts and vertical video.

Initial Prototype

To gain leadership's sign on for the project, I did some quick wireframes (using the design system) of what the app could look like based on a few simple requirements:

initial mock of home tab home tab
initial mock of article tab article tab
initial mock of podcasts tab podcasts tab
initial mock of video tab video tab
initial mock of account tab account tab

Nav & Video

Once we got signoff to work on the app, we wanted to start building it ASAP. So, the first big decision we committed to was using the default Apple liquid glass bottom navigation. One of the app developers highly encouraged us to do this because it would be easier to maintain. At first I didn't love it because I liked the look of the more custom navs but I was eventually convinced because the native audio player (for podcasts) was very slick and the general tradeoffs seemed better for everyone involved.

custom nav idea custom nav idea
custom nav idea custom nav idea
custom nav idea custom nav idea
custom nav idea custom nav idea
home tab + liquid glass nav home tab + liquid glass nav
home tab + liquid glass native audio player home tab + liquid glass native audio player
podcasts tab + liquid glass nav podcasts tab + liquid glass nav
more tab + liquid glass nav more tab + liquid glass nav

For the video tab, editorial requested an emphasis on vertical video but also wanted to feature their horizontal video content from YouTube. I initially was trying a version where both were featured on the main video tab and after you clicked on a video, you could vertically scroll thru all the videos. But, as the biggest TikTok user on the team, I thought featuring only vertical video that played automatically was a better experience. I suggested this to the team and they agreed it was more engaging and were okay to do this if we could feature horizontal video on the home tab.

initial video tab mock initial video tab mock
initial video playing mock initial video playing mock
video tab with only vertical video video tab with only vertical video

Podcasts

The podcasts tab was one of the most complicated parts of the app. One of the core parts of the app was being able to listen to Vox podcasts in the app (subscribers get ad-free podcasts, non-subscribers get ads) so it was important to nail the user experience. I also had to figure out the correct focus for the page. Today, Explained publishes every day and is the most popular Vox podcast but we wanted to feature all Vox podcasts.

Initially I thought a natural experience would be the latest Today, Explained episode at the top of the page followed by a few of the latest episodes for each show. When designing for podcasts, I'm always wondering if it is more important to emphasize the episode or the show that the episode is part of.

initial option initial option
initial option initial option
initial option initial option
initial option initial option
initial option initial option

When we showed these ideas to editorial, they didn't like the emphasis only on Today, Explained, they wanted the focus of the page to be on all podcasts. I was struggling with the initial layout so decided to try something with quick links to the shows at the top and then latest episodes below.

We presented these 2 options to editorial:

Option 1

Option 2

option 1 option 1
option 1 option 1 + podcast playing
option 1 option 2
option 1 option 2 + podcast playing

Editorial liked the new option that focused on all the shows and that option also felt like a more straightforward design so we went with that. I also added screens for show and episode pages.

final podcast tab final podcast tab
final podcast tab + podcast playing final podcast tab + podcast playing
final show page final show page
final episode page final episode page
final episode page + podcast playing final episode page + podcast playing
native app audio player native app audio player

Home tab & onboarding coming soon...