Designing an audio research notebook for collaborative student learning

Students have good tools for studying from text. They can highlight a PDF, annotate an article, copy a quote, and share a reference that points to the exact line.

Audio gives them none of that. A useful idea sits inside a 40-minute episode, and unless the student stops to note a timestamp or switches to a separate notes app, it’s gone. Sharing is worse — a podcast link tells a study partner nothing about which two minutes mattered.

The question this kept coming back to: how might we help students capture, organise, and discuss useful moments from audio as easily as they already do with text?

The primary user is a research-heavy university student, using podcasts, recorded lectures, audiobooks, and uploaded readings while working on essays, assignments, and group study.

Research had two parts: a short survey of listeners about how they consume and study from audio (around two dozen responses, so I treat it as directional rather than robust), and desk and market research into how existing tools handle audio. I looked at how podcast apps, note-taking tools, read-it-later apps, and university learning tools break down once audio has to become study material.

Together, the survey and the desk research pointed to five conclusions, each of which shaped a feature.

The first version of Jess tried to be too much — discovery, social feeds, live broadcasting, premium courses. The most useful thing I did on this project was cut it back. I narrowed the MVP to one learning loop: capture a useful moment, give it context, and make it reusable. Everything that didn’t serve that was deferred.

Four rounds of sketches show the narrowing in practice — the app moving from a broad podcast structure toward a focused clip-and-notes tool. Step through them; click a sketch to enlarge.

The MVP comes down to a single cycle that turns listening into reusable, shareable study material.

The walkthrough follows one student from hearing something useful to reusing it later. Step through it below.

I ran 3 informal usability sessions with friends who were students at the time. They weren’t formally recruited, so I treat them as directional rather than conclusive.

One signal stood out: a participant was uncomfortable that their study activity might be visible to others by default. That reinforced a decision I’d been weighing — to give students explicit private/public control over clips, notes, and playlists, rather than assuming a social-by-default model.

I treated Jess as a multimodal study tool, not an audio-only app — students should be able to listen, read transcripts, search saved clips, and comment in text or audio.