When the Designer Is the User

The Problem

Two Platforms, Painful Downloads, Lost Every Morning

I have 2,000 audiobooks on Audioteka. I pay a monthly subscription and I'm a happy customer — the catalog is great, the service works. But I listen on the go, switching between Wi-Fi and mobile data, often in areas with patchy signal. Audioteka's player always reaches for the network. When it can't connect, it stalls. You can download books for offline listening, but it's manual — remember to do it before you leave, or you're stuck.

I also have about 50 books on Audiolibrix, another Czech audiobook service. Their app is worse: tap Play and a popup tells you nothing is downloaded, asking if you'd like to download first. So I stopped using it — but I still want access to those books.

That's the real reason I built my own player: reliable offline playback and merging two platforms into one library. Even Claude told me I shouldn't start this — said I should use an existing platform. But I didn't like the players.

So I built Přehrávač — and it's a web player, a PWA running in Safari, not a native iOS app. It works better than the native apps it replaces.

A Fair Look

Audioteka Is Good

Clickable author and narrator links, player controls within thumb reach, a catalog millions use daily. But some things add up.

Library

2,000 Books and No Way to Narrow Them

Most evenings the same question: what should I listen to next? I know I like a narrator, I'm in the mood for sci-fi — but I can't combine those. Tap a narrator and you see everything they've read: crime, romance, history. No way to say "just the sci-fi." So I scroll through a flat list, trying to remember what I've already heard.

Player

Interruptions Are Always "About 10 Minutes"

Someone stops to chat, your mind wanders on a walk, you doze off for a bit — when you come back, you need to rewind. It's always roughly the same amount: five, ten, maybe fifteen minutes. Dragging a slider means guessing — you never know how much time you just moved. Tapping a dot that's always 5 minutes is a different thing entirely. You know exactly where you'll land.

Series

Most of My Favorites Are Series

Honor Harringtonová, Boží mlýn s turbem, the Czech sci-fi I keep coming back to — most of what I listen to are long series. I want to know where I am: Part 3 of 7, not just a title in a list. And when I discover a new series, I want to know what it's about before committing to 50 hours of listening.

Design Insight

Before Building Clever Features, Make the Basic Interaction Right

Audiobook players play chapters. So the progress bar sometimes represents 8 minutes, sometimes 3 hours. I don't care about chapters. I care how much of the book is left.

The first solution was obvious: show book-level time and add ±30 minute skip buttons so users can jump past chapter boundaries. Then I built a sleep timer with a rewind feature — fall asleep for 30 minutes, wake up, and the player offers to rewind exactly those 30 minutes with one tap. It felt like a killer feature.

Then I redesigned the seek bar itself. Instead of a continuous slider, I built a 30-minute window centered on the current position, with 5-minute interval dots as tap targets. Want to go back 10 minutes? One tap on the −10 dot. Forward 5? One tap. The dots are large enough for a sleepy thumb at midnight.

Something unexpected happened: the sleep rewind toast — the "killer feature" I was proud of — went from essential to optional. When basic navigation is one tap on the nearest dot, you rely on clever workarounds less.