My Life in Product Management

I was playing the podcast in SoundCloud and realized I need to pause the audio for a while. That when I realized I could not find the familiar pause button anywhere on the screen. Instinctively, I clicked on the audio frequency chart which moved along to show the length of the audio being played. Nothing happened. Then I looked at the screen again and found it. I clicked on the nice background image and the audio was paused and the play button was then displayed on the screen if I need to resume. What had happened made me ponder from the perspective of the product design. While I was not being too frustrated of not able to pause the audio on my first attempt and had to waste 5 seconds before I could do what I wanted to do, there are some definitely some trade-offs between different choices, such as: 1. Having a great aesthetic (the nice background and minimal buttons) versus having a more functional screen (clear buttons display) 2. Letting user experience new design (nice...