The AudioApp
A radio tradition, reimagined as a community.
How a decades-old habit of Paraguayan talk radio — calling in to leave a voice message — became the brief for a community audio-sharing app. End-to-end product design for a project that never made it to launch.
The idea behind La AudioApp wasn't born in a design studio. It started in the 1990s, at the control desk of a traditional Paraguayan radio station. A veteran journalist had a simple idea: install an automatic answering machine that would record listeners' voice messages — opinions, complaints, thoughts on politics, the economy, everyday life — and play them on air exactly as they came in.
It wasn't a suggestion box. It was the audience literally exercising their power to speak freely.
The format stuck around for decades and became part of the station's identity. Years later, the media group behind that station — the same company where I worked as a designer — decided that analog habit deserved a second life: turning it into an app.
The brief was ambitious: not just digitizing an answering machine, but turning that concept into a full social audio network. An app where anyone could create an account, record and publish audio clips, listen to others, follow users, save favorites, and organize content with tags — everything expected from a digital community, built around voice instead of text or images.
On top of that came an editorial challenge: the company already ran live radio stations and a video streaming channel, and wanted the new app to work as a hub that combined that existing content with the community's audio submissions, all in one place.
Questions that guided the design: How do you translate "hold to talk" into a touch interface without losing the immediacy of the original gesture? How do you moderate user-submitted content without killing the spontaneity that made the format valuable? How do curated content (radio, TV) and open community content live together in one app?
I owned the end-to-end product design: information architecture, user flows, wireframes, and final UI in Figma, designed with a future Android/iOS build in mind. Since this was an internal initiative without a dedicated research team, most of the "research" work meant translating decades of real audience behavior — how people called in, what they recorded, how long their messages ran — into product rules.
The visual system took its cue from an on-air radio studio: a dark, "control room" background, a high-contrast lime green for primary actions (record, publish, play), and a condensed, direct typeface built for an interface that revolves around audio, not long-form text.
The flow, screen by screen
From onboarding to recording, publishing, and browsing the community feed. These are the final prototype screens as handed off for development (branding and names replaced per the NDA).
A simple login, with sign-up by name, email, and date of birth. Priority: keep friction low so any listener could join.
One big central button, hold to record: the same gesture as "talking to the answering machine," now on the phone.
Before sending, users add a title and tags to their clip, so it can be found within the community.
Every submitted clip stays in a "Pending" state until it's reviewed. Status is always visible to the user.
A feed of published clips, filterable by recent, popular, and favorites, with inline playback and sharing.
Account management, photo, personal details, and password — the base for future social features like follows and contacts.
Key design decisions
One button, one gesture
The record button is the largest element in the app and always sits within thumb's reach. Built for one-handed use, mirroring the immediacy of picking up the phone and just talking.
Transparent moderation
Instead of hiding the review process, every clip shows its status — Pending, published, or removed. Users never lose track of what happened to what they recorded.
Tags as the discovery system
Without a complex algorithmic feed feasible for this first version, tags did the work of organizing and making a growing catalog of voices browsable.
A hub, not just another app
Live radio and video streaming live in the same bottom navigation as community content, so the app could replace — not compete with — the audience's existing habits.
Studio aesthetic, not generic social app
Dark background, lime accent, condensed type: an identity that feels closer to an on-air control room than a social-network template.
La AudioApp never made it to a public release, so this case study has no download numbers, retention, or engagement to show. What it does have is a complete product design process: turning a decades-old radio tradition into a system of screens, flows, and a visual identity ready for development.
It's still one of the projects I most enjoyed designing. It didn't start from a blank page — it started from a real, already-validated human behavior, tested on air for years — and the job was finding its correct digital shape. If it's ever picked back up, the design foundation is ready to grow into deeper social features: contacts, direct messages between users, and a community-curated feed.
about this project.
Curious about the process, the flows I didn't show here, or want to see more of my product design work? I'd love to walk you through it.
hola@joseflores.com.py