Pinecast 2.0: The dashboard redesign
Back in 2015, I built Pinecast out of necessity: the podcast host my buddy was using was going out of business. Looking at the options, I was dissatisfied with every option out there, so I decided to build my own. My buddy was editing podcasts as a side hustle, so I joined forces with him.
After thousands of iterations and tweaks, Pinecast became what it is today. But instead of just being my friends, it’s tens of thousands of amateur and professional podcasters, businesses, students, priests and pastors, and more. What hasn’t changed much, though, is the look and feel of the site.
During the early days, a coworker at my day job presented me with a Photoshop mockup of a design for Pinecast. It was good! Much better than what I had, anyway. I quickly turned it from a picture of a website into the real thing.
Pinecast has grown and evolved, with hundreds of new features and details:
- The quality, reliability, and depth of the analytics are far better (and those awful squiggly line charts are gone!)
- The Tip Jar was added and expanded to dozens of countries, and podcasters have been paid out tens of thousands of dollars
- The audio and artwork uploaders can fix issues with your MP3 and artwork files
- Pricing is more flexible with a la carte add-on packages
- Podcast websites were added, and later a site builder
- A tool to renumber episodes in bulk to use Apple’s season and episode number tags was built
- New embed player themes were introduced, with new features like seek bars
- Collaboration tools like networks and individual collaborators were introduced, along with Slack, Discord, and email notifications
- Podcast reviews are indexed and stored, with notifications when someone rates and reviews your show
And much, much more.
What hasn’t changed very much, though, is the look and feel of the dashboard. Here’s that same podcast from this week:
The colors are a bit different, the UI is a bit tighter, we have a cool font, but otherwise, it’s pretty much the same website.
Problems with the current design
While the design worked, it hasn’t been good. As Pinecast has grown, the design has had lots of growing pains:
- Space on the blue tab bar along the top has gotten scarce, especially on mobile. We’ve needed to combine features, like podcast review monitoring and our listener feedback service.
- The “Dashboard” tab has a lot of stuff—but unless you’re looking for analytics, what you want to see is rarely above the fold. It’s hard to get at-a-glance details.
- Some tabs have tabs within them, and some of those tabs have their own tabs. Lots of features are simply too hard to find because they’ve been shuffled away deep within some tabs.
- The onboarding process needs improvement, but shuffling around the UI based on where you are in the process is difficult and hard to maintain.
- Different parts of the UI are built with different UI frameworks (that is, some are plain old HTML, and some are built with React). This led to visual inconsistencies, and confusion when some parts of the UI instantly update, while others require a page refresh.
- The UI is built in such a way that everything on the dashboard loads all at once, and information is not shared between tabs. This meant slow page loads, but also lots of wasted bandwidth.
Other problems, usually less obvious, kept popping up and making Pinecast less nice to use. Earlier this year, a customer canceled simply because they didn’t like the UI—this cut deep, but it was honest feedback. I had my Domino’s moment.
So what changed
The process of redesigning the dashboard started with sketches of a new sidebar-driven UI. On desktop, we now use more horizontal screen space, with a vertical tab sidebar that won’t run out of room as we add new functionality.
Our most engaged customers use Pinecast a lot, and have a lot of content. Every view that includes a list of podcasts, networks, or episodes now has filters with fuzzy matching to make it easier to find exactly what you need.
Clicking between pages renders a UI instantly, and loads only the information needed for that page. Clicking “back” renders a page in milliseconds.
When you click into a podcast, you see a new, re-thought Overview page. This has all of the information about your show that you need to access quickly. Mini charts show recent listens and subscribers (clicking on them loads the full-sized versions!).
Press ⌘+K (ctrl+K on Windows) on any podcast dashboard to load our new quick switcher, to jump between shows in your account in networks that you belong to.
We’d love your feedback on the quick switcher. We know that there’s room for improvement!
Analytics and the episode list are now on their own tabs. This allows room for more information and new features. Each analytics view, for instance, now includes a blurb about how to read and interpret the charts.
Speaking of analytics, every analytics view has been overhauled with a fresh coat of paint.
Analytics for episodes, podcasts, and networks have all been gone over with a fine-toothed comb. Please let us know if you have feedback on how we can improve!
The old “Apps” tab has been replaced with “Distribution”. We make it easier to get your show listed on apps and directories, with clear summaries of directory terms of service.
You can now also link your show to its directory listings on Apple and Stitcher (more to come) with a single click. We’ll be expanding on this in an update later this month!
We’ve also replaced our show notes editor with a new WYSIWYG editor, for faster and easier editing. It still supports Markdown, if you’re inclined to use that instead!
The redesign is absolutely packed with lots of little details and improvements. We’ve aggregated hundreds of pieces of feedback, and beta tested with some awesome folks who have given real, actionable data. We hope that as you dig into the redesign, you’ll find it surprisingly great to use.
What next?
Stay tuned for a big new feature coming later this month. We’re not spilling the beans just yet…follow us on Twitter to be the first to know!
https://twitter.com/getpinecast
With the new design launched, development speed is at an all-time high and product quality is substantially easier to maintain. Updates to analytics, the site builder, the tip jar, billing, and more are planned for the coming months!
If you have questions, concerns, or other feedback about the redesign, please reach out to us through the chat on every page of our site.
