Dropping Wisdom with Santos: turning a long-form podcast into a product.
Dropping Wisdom with Santos is a long-form podcast built around reflection, identity, and lived experience, with a back catalogue scattered across Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and Instagram.
This case study walks through how I came on as the only designer and turned that scattered presence into a single product surface, in one month, with no brand guidelines, no analytics, and no engineering partner.
Translating a long-form podcast into a product home of its own.
Santos had spent years building the show. Episodes, recurring themes, a clear voice, a real audience.
But everything outside the audio lived in scattered places. A podcast host. A few social accounts. No home of its own.
I came on as the only designer to turn that catalogue into a product.
No brand guidelines. No analytics. No engineering partner.
Dropping Wisdom with Santos homepage, the show's new product home, consolidating a scattered content presence
What existed was the show itself. Episodes, themes, voice, personality.
What didn’t exist was almost everything a designer usually starts with.
No design system. No content strategy. No data on which episodes mattered most or how new listeners were finding the show.
That gap was the actual brief.
Two-column inventory diagram contrasting what already existed against what was missing at the start of the project
Naming the boundaries up front so the work could survive them.
A few things set the boundaries early, and I designed against them from the start instead of hitting them later.
I was working solo. No developer to sanity-check feasibility in real time. So I avoided anything I couldn’t hand off cleanly.
Podcast listeners are on phones. Usually mid-task. So the site had to work one-handed before it worked anywhere else.
And there were no features to hide behind. No search, no accounts, no playlists. The content and the path to it were the whole product.
Three labeled constraint rows describing the boundaries the design had to work within
With no brand system to inherit, the identity had to come from the show itself.
I listened through episodes and wrote down what kept coming up. Direct. Expressive. A little raw. More conversation than broadcast.
Then I used that as the brief for the visual language.
That turned into a dark UI, bold display type, and one accent color used sparingly enough that it still meant something when it showed up.
Desktop home screen showing the visual language derived from the show's voice: dark UI, bold display type, single restrained accent color
Designing for the new listener when there’s no data on the old one.
Without analytics, I couldn’t optimize for what people actually wanted.
So I designed for what I’d expect a new listener to need.
A featured episode up front. Episodes grouped by themes instead of dates. Clear ways into the back catalogue for the people who finished an episode and wanted more.
Most podcast sites default to reverse chronological order. For a show with a thematic spine, that’s the wrong call.
Episode index screen: featured episode up front, episodes grouped by theme rather than date
Engagement on a content site isn’t really about clever interactions. It’s about whether the page invites a second scroll.
I worked the mobile layout first. Tap targets, thumb reach, where the play button sits when you’re holding the phone one-handed.
Rhythm carried more weight than I expected. Long mobile pages die when every section looks the same. Alternating density and giving featured content extra room kept the page moving.
Mobile prototype of the podcast site, designed for thumb-reach and one-handed use
With no users to recruit and no budget for sessions, I leaned on AI-driven testing as the validation layer, running the key screens through AI reviewers prompted as usability auditors, and having AI roleplay a first-time listener narrating their way through the site.
That surfaced real fixes: weak affordance on the mobile play controls, featured and recent episodes reading at the same visual weight, a dead-end on the episode detail page, and an unclear entry point into themes. An AI-assisted contrast check also caught one body-text pairing on the dark UI, which I adjusted and re-checked.
What this kind of testing can’t tell you is how a real listener feels on the page, whether the tone lands, and whether the site actually converts a casual visitor into a subscriber. Those are open questions I’d close with real sessions and analytics once the site had time to live.
Three labeled rows describing the AI-driven testing methods used as the validation layer
Being honest about what got cut and what got carried.
Every cut had a cost worth being honest about.
Dense episode indexes. This made navigation harder for listeners who already know the catalogue, but new-listener clarity mattered more right now.
Experimental per-episode layouts. This gave up the chance for each episode page to feel like its own thing, but consistency was the only way to keep the site shippable solo.
Heavier navigation. This hurt discoverability of secondary pages. But a simpler nav protected the editorial feel of the homepage, which was doing most of the work.
Three tradeoff rows, each showing what was cut on the left resolving into what was kept on the right
An identity that matches the show’s voice. A structure that supports discovery instead of just listing. A mobile experience designed for how people actually arrive. A surface area small enough that one person can keep it running.
The quieter outcome was having a clear point of view on what the product is. Which meant future decisions, like adding a section or a sponsor placement, had something to be measured against.
Shipped Dropping Wisdom with Santos site, the scattered content presence consolidated into a single product surface
This project wasn’t about building a complex system.
It was about translating personality into structure.
Success meant knowing when to push visual expression, and when to pull back for clarity.
The final result feels expressive, but still usable. And that balance is what makes content-driven products work.
A balance diagram positioning visual expression against clarity, with a closing takeaway