ITVX | Product Personas
Creating core streaming personas
Company:
ITV News
Duration:
6 weeks
Platforms:
Role:
Product Designer
TL;DR
ITV News offers a wide range of podcasts covering news, current affairs and long-form journalism, available across both the app and browser. Prior to this project, the podcast player existed only in the browser - users on the app who wanted to listen to a podcast were redirected out of the app entirely, breaking the experience and creating unnecessary friction.
The browser player itself was also unreliable. It regularly froze when users tried to scrub through episodes, kicked users out when they navigated away from the page, and prevented multitasking entirely. For a content type that users expect to consume passively in the background, this was a fundamental failure of the experience.
My Role
Sole product designer end to end - from research and competitor analysis through to final designs and handoff.
The Problem
Two distinct problems needed solving:
For app users: There was no native podcast player at all. App users were forced out of the ITV News app to listen to any podcast, creating a broken, disjointed experience that was at odds with how users expect audio content to work on mobile.
For all users: The existing browser player was technically broken. Users couldn't scrub through episodes without the player freezing, couldn't continue listening while browsing other content, and were regularly kicked back to the beginning of an episode if they tried to interact with anything else on screen.
Objectives
Process
User research
Rather than conducting primary research from scratch, I was able to draw on a substantial bank of existing customer complaints about the podcast experience. The feedback was consistent and clear - users were frustrated by the freezing player, furious about being kicked back to the beginning of episodes, and confused as to why they couldn't continue listening while browsing elsewhere. Three recurring themes emerged: the scrubbing experience was broken, background playback didn't work, and the app redirect was unacceptable.
The complaints also surfaced a clear expectation - users expected the ITV News podcast player to behave like Spotify or any other audio app they used daily. That framed the competitive benchmark.
"It's incredibly frustrating when I try to skip further into the episode, and the player freezes, and the only way to unfreeze it is to press backwards, which then kicks me out of the episode and I have to start all over again from the beginning."
"Why bother having a podcast player at all, if it stops working when I navigate away and carry on browsing the site? Surely it should continue to play and I should be able to read news articles or do other stuff on my phone at the same time as listening to a podcast?!"
"I think the podcast player has a bug, because it's really glitchy and often freezes if I try to do anything else on my phone screen other than not touch anything and listen to the podcast. It either freezes or kicks me out of it"
Competitor analysis
I conducted a thorough competitor analysis across Spotify, Audible, Castbox, Wondery and the native Podcast app, documenting their player features, episode list structures, mini player behaviours and navigation patterns.
The analysis revealed several features the ITV browser player was missing entirely: pagination for episode lists, matching skip forward and backward controls, thumbnail scrubbing, a sticky player bar and a persistent mini player for continued listening while browsing. These became the baseline feature set for the native player.
Castbox
Podcast Player
Spotify
Wondery
Native app player A fully redesigned podcast player built natively for the ITV News app, resolving all the core issues of the browser version. The player supports thumbnail scrubbing, matched skip controls and pagination - addressing the three most consistent pain points from user feedback.
Persistent mini player The most significant new feature. Inspired by Spotify's mini player, this sits persistently at the bottom of the app while a podcast is playing, allowing users to continue browsing news articles, navigate between sections and use the app freely without interrupting playback. Tapping the mini player expands back to the full player at any point.
Branded and flexible The player was designed to flex across ITV News's full podcast range - accommodating different show branding, episode artwork and content types without requiring bespoke treatment for each podcast. The design system approach meant it could scale across the full catalogue without additional design overhead.
Results
Following launch, app podcast engagement increased by 37%. Monthly listenership reached 1.6 million - a clear signal that bringing the experience natively into the app, and fixing the core usability failures that had frustrated users for so long, had a direct and measurable impact on how people engaged with ITV News podcasts.
Learnings
Existing complaints are underused research. The customer complaint data gave me immediately actionable, specific insights without needing to run additional research. The problems were already documented — the job was to solve them, not rediscover them.
Parity with platform conventions is not a design failure. Users come to a podcast player with established expectations shaped by Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Audible. Meeting those expectations isn't a lack of creativity — it's the right call. The innovation was in bringing it natively into the app, not in reinventing how a podcast player works.
Background playback is table stakes for audio. The inability to multitask while listening was the single biggest frustration in the complaint data. Any audio experience that doesn't support background playback is broken by design, regardless of how good the player itself looks.
