UX Research for automatic download & deletion

[keunes]

Hi @George_Rowland

@George_Rowland

First of all I’d like to say how cool the app is. I had a go with it last night - I think it’s one of the more polished open source apps I’ve seen recently, I can tell you’ve all put a lot of passion into it!

Nice! I’m sure it’ll be helpful to have some experience with the app Have you used other podcast apps before?

@George_Rowland

I have just been looking at the automatic download function you mentioned. I can see what you mean by how it’s hard to find but it seems really useful. I did also go through GitHub and some of the forums topics last night to get a sense of what you’ve been developing.

The auto-download system works fine as it is, but our users have been requesting some new features both for auto download itself and which interact with the the process. The most-important one is the Option to auto download oldest episodes first. It has no less than 132 comments, indicating how much debated its implementation is Other requests include:

• the ability to keep only the n newest episodes in the queue (#2077)
• the ability to set priorities for podcasts (#2437)
• an automatic clean-up of episodes that is separated from the automatic download process (#1856)
• ability to create multiple (user-definable) queues (#2648)

You can find these and all other relevant issues on GitHub, under the Rework automatic download/deletion milestone (except the last in the above bullet point list, which is already part of another milestone, even though it affects auto-download too).

Why I initially brought up AntennaPod with the Open Source Design team, is because the auto download process needs a rework which already integrates – or at least is ready – for all these requests. There’s so many new features and different ideas: it’s a complex thing to do right. And because it’s quite core to the app experience and a massive job code-wise also, I would like to do this right (that is: first discuss & agree on the UX).

@George_Rowland

Research such as user journeys can be made there but they can also be imported to be used if you wanted to present this somewhere, such as on the website. Long term we could put together a case study. But I’m open to any suggestions you and the rest of the team have

In terms of process, I have earlier proposed these steps the work on the auto-download rework that we could use as a basis. Would be happy to hear from you (in this thread) what you think of it (I’m totally happy to go about it differently).

@George_Rowland

one possibility is that I create a Figma design where we can gather everything. … I was also wondering if it would be useful to put together a prototype of the app? It would at the very least help give me a better understanding of it. It wouldn’t take very long to do.

I think having a full ‘replica’ of the app would be helpful indeed – also as a base for new interface designs. However, regarding the tool: I would really prefer it if we could use Penpot (https://penpot.app). It is a competitor of Figma (very similar in use), but then open source!

We prefer to use open source tools in our work for AntennaPod for ideological reasons. But going for an open source solution like Penpot also gives us the freedom to download, store (e.g. in our code repository) & use our work (designs) now as well as in the future (even if the hosted version or the company behind the product go down). As an added bonus Penpot has some useful features that require a paid subscription in Figma (e.g. shared libraries).

Would you be willing to give it a try? I already have a set of Components and screens I did for mock-ups, which we can build on:

Penpot | Design Freedom for Teams

Looking forward to hearing back from you. And thanks again for offering your help!