Eduardo Roxius
05  ·  Mobile & consumer tech

Spoon Radio

Accelerating feature innovation through collaborative prototyping and user-centric design

Spoon Radio on orange phones: the live home with streams on air, a prompt asking what you would like to hear, Spoon’s Choice DJs, a live room with its host and guests, chat, and topics to follow.
Company
Daylight Design, for Spoon Radio
Role
UX Designer, leading prototyping, research and strategy
Team
Spoon Radio’s internal design team, with product and engineering
Platform
Live audio app: “live stream without a camera”
Pace
Weekly releases, user tests every sprint

Spoon Radio is a live audio platform built on a simple premise: “live stream without a camera.” To maintain its competitive edge, the team wanted to explore new ways to engage their community and empower creators.

Spoon partnered with Daylight not to just design features, but to establish a culture of experimentation. We worked together to ideate, prototype, and test new concepts with users before engineering began.

As a UX Designer at Daylight Design, I led the prototyping, research, and strategy workstream. I partnered closely with Spoon Radio’s internal design team to run tight iteration cycles, validate direction with users, and align on what to build next.

Working with Daylight made us realize what a powerful resource a good UX design leadership can be. After this experience, we are now looking to hire a Head of Design.

Neil Choi, CEO, Spoon Radio
A person with headphones on a yellow couch, holding a phone that shows Spoon’s home screen with featured live streams and Spoon Originals.

The challenge

  1. Innovation vs. riskThe team wanted to be bold with new social features but needed to know they would actually drive engagement, not just add clutter.
  2. Speed at scaleSpoon releases weekly. They needed a design process that could keep up with their engineering cadence without sacrificing quality.
  3. Breaking silosWe needed to bring product, design, and engineering together to make decisions as a single, unified team.
A slide titled Dividing work by the team best equipped to tackle each issue. Issues tagged referral, discovery, onboarding, content, navigation, or trust and privacy sit in three columns: Spoon, Spoon plus Daylight, and Daylight.

The approach

  1. A remote session on a shared board titled Category selection, with four options side by side and three people on video. Collaborative ideation

    We moved away from “reveal” presentations. Instead, we held co-creation workshops where stakeholders sketched and brainstormed alongside us.

  2. Around twenty phone screens from Spoon Radio prototypes: onboarding, live rooms, podcasts, chat groups, a home screen and profiles. Prototyping as a language

    We built around 75 clickable, high-fidelity prototypes to simulate new interactions. This allowed the team to “feel” a feature before it was built.

  3. Slides of key observations, each marked critical or important. One reads: let users customise their profile page with a cover picture, with participants’ comments around two profile designs. Rapid user testing

    We put these prototypes in front of users every sprint. We didn’t ask “do you like this?”, we watched how they used it, what confused them, and what delighted them.

Impact

Decisions about what to build moved from opinions to what we saw in user tests. After the engagement, Spoon Radio set out to hire a Head of Design.

  • +350%Daily listens (week)
  • 2×Listening time
Three Spoon Radio screens: follow your interests, a home screen that welcomes new listeners with popular live streams, and a profile with a cover picture.
Choosing topics to follow, a home screen that previews popular live streams, and a profile with a cover picture.

Reflection

  • What I learned

    At Spoon Radio, the role of design was to facilitate better conversations. By making ideas tangible early, we bridged the gap between business goals and user needs.

  • What I’d do differently

    I’d push for even tighter integration with engineering earlier in the prototyping phase to catch technical constraints before testing.