NPR One iPhone app first time user experience
The good bits:
- The app begins with an interactive intro tour. A Guy Raz voice clip explains key features (“Let us use the mic on your phone so you can talk to us”) and these explanations are reinforced by visual highlights that progressively appear during playback.
- The introductory clip plays within the normal controls of the app, which helps the user get comfortable with how real clips will appear in the future.
- The user is prompted to press play to begin the clip, instead of the clip auto-playing. This allows the user to make sure that he is in a good place to listen.
- The user can use the skip button to go straight to the sign-up screen.
- All prompts for location or microphone access are deferred until after the introduction and user sign-up.
- The user’s NPR channel is automatically selected based on his location.
To be improved:
- While the voice clip is short, there are several instructions covered in its duration and these fly by quickly. This may cause the user to forget things or feel overwhelmed.
- Unfortunately, it seems the user cannot move the playhead backwards to hear an instruction again. Even if a real radio broadcast won’t allow scrubbing, it may be a good idea for NPR to make an exception in this case.
- There are some cases where the visual highlights make it seem like the user should interact with the cue being shown (for example, the microphone highlight). This is an expectation when samples are placed in the context of normal interaction, so it can be frustrating to only be able to interact with two of the controls (the play and skip buttons) but not with any others. To both help users retain information and lessen this confusion, NPR may want to explore pausing between instructions and asking the user to interact with the element in question. Just increasing the pause between clips could be helpful.
- It seems prudent to let users proceed without signing in. NPR One explains that signing in ensures it never plays the same story twice, but the app can use local storage to keep track of previous stories so this argument quickly breaks down. A sign-in prompt may be more relevant after the user plays his first few clips and might be better focused on cross-device purposes (for example, “Want to listen to these clips on other devices? Create an account.”).
- After the clip plays through, and even after the user signs in and starts exploring the app, the welcome clip is no longer accessible.