Add more button options to the player's extra controls options, including "other episodes" and tidy up menu options
Under:
Settings (player) > Controls > Show extra player controls
Please add an option for an "other episodes" button.
"Privacy information" and "custom settings (podcast feed)" should also be added to this so that people have the option for a cleaner description page with more space, if you could choose to remove those buttons.
I think that the buttons at the very top ("favorite (episode)", "sleep timer", and "playback speed adjustment") would be better in the player's extra control section.
Adding a button to switch between car layout and the regular one here would be ideal too; often when you hop in your car and get driving, you don't have the luxury to be fiddling around in menus and it's the sort of function that is a textbook example for having a button dedicated to in an app.
I think it would be more logical and intuitive to place the bookmarks and favorites buttons together in the same place, the audio effects button menu should incorporate the button for playback speed adjustment, and the customize podcast menu should be added into the player settings triple-dot menu.
At present, the app presents you with a buckshot of menus and options which are scattered across pages and it made navigating this app completely overwhelming when I first started to use it.
From the player you can:
• Open the hamburger menu and access a settings button there
• Access the triple-dot settings menu with limited settings options
• Swipe across to the description page and access another settings menu to customize (the podcast, although it doesn't explain this clearly)
...that's a lot of menus that all seem to kind of overlap but also kind of not, and to know which options are available for each settings menu takes a lot of trial-and-error and a lot of learning/memorizing.
Then you have:
• Some options that affect the playback in the bar at the top
• The option to add a second set of buttons to affect playback with the "extra player controls" menu (although the settings in this menu are different to the settings available in the top bar)
• Further buttons located on the description page which are specific to the episode being played
It just feels like there are so many vaguely-described settings buttons that share similar/identical icons but which take you to separate menus and a lot of options placed in odd locations.
The player triple-dot menu has "play from position" as an option, one of many I have completed ignored because it wasn't self-explanatory (I can just hit "play" to play from the position on the playback bar...) except it's actually "Set playback position".
It isn't necessary to add this into one of the three/four available menus with a text option. Intuitively, a person who wants to set the playback position manually would tap the counter for elapsed playtime because that's where you'd expect to be able to change those numbers. It's also very much a low-priority menu option to have placed in the most prominent menu on the player.
Same can be said for the "website" option in the menu. A tiny little 🔗 icon in the description is the logical place to put this low-priority menu option (also is it the website for the app or for the podcast? I discovered this today because I finally tried out the menu item but it is not something which is obvious from the menu itself.)
The options for "playback statistics" and "podcast description" don't need to be there either - one is a poweruser menu option that is accessible elsewhere and the other can be accessed by swiping which is intuitive and clearly indicated.