JAMES: Welcome to Happy Paths, where we unpack the human stories behind some of the most used, most influential, and most famous software from the internet era. I'm James Evans. I'm the CEO of CommandBar, and the host of Happy Paths. 


Sometimes, a technology becomes coupled with a specific moment in time. For example, Bitcoin sprung from the ashes of the Global Financial Crisis in 2009. Today, we're going to talk about a technology and a product that is hard to separate from the COVID pandemic. Today, we're going to talk about social audio, specifically synchronous social audio, where a speaker and audience join together in a big digital room.


We're going to zero in on one social audio product, in particular, Twitter Spaces. Twitter wasn't the first company to get traction with a social audio product, but they quickly became a leader in the space, in no small part thanks to the work of Maya Gold Patterson, who was the Lead Product Designer for Spaces through its launch and early growth. 


I talked with Maya about her experience helping build Spaces. It turned out to be a fascinating story on several levels. We talked about how to learn from competitors' launches, how companies with large reach can still ship experiments thoughtfully, and how specific design decisions the Spaces team made took advantage of the Twitter platform to grow beyond other social audio apps. 


So, let's try to recall the beginning of the pandemic. Cities were suddenly dealing with lockdown. No one could travel. And many people were bored and stressed at home trying to find ways to stay connected with friends and family. But while many people associate social audio with the pandemic, the work to build Twitter Spaces actually began before COVID struck.


MAYA: I joined Twitter January 7th, 2020. There was a really small team. And by small, I mean, like, three people that were essentially given the opportunity to go into a little hole inside of Twitter and prototype experiments around audio, super ambiguous, super no bounds at all, which I think was pretty smart. And the individuals who were doing that work, who I ended up working with, came from Periscope. So they had a lot of knowledge around synchronous audio and video already, which I think set the team up for success long term.


JAMES: Did you join Twitter specifically to work on audio? Did you know that was what you were signing up for?


MAYA: So I was recruited by Dantley Davis, who was the CTO at the time. And I was, at the time, at Facebook, and I had worked on their sharing team, which essentially is, like, all of the camera features and story features. And then I was on Watch. And I just was a little bit burnt out by the concept of consumer-facing sharing features. And I thought this would be one of the same, and so I was like, "Ah, Dantley, I don't know about this." 


I think he knew something that I didn't know, which is that the guys who were already sort of noodling on the audio space at Twitter, and the way in which I work, and the way in which they work was going to be, like, this magical sort of experience that would enable us to design a really important product for the company.


JAMES: So Twitter was busy cooking up something audio-related, but they obviously weren't the only ones. Clubhouse launched their beta in April 2020.


[Audio Clip]


"Clubhouse is all about connecting people through audio. So once you're on the app, you can join rooms where people are in the middle of a conversation or simply start one of your own. Think of it like a live recording of a podcast where you can actually talk back and contribute to the conversation." 


JAMES: Like many people, I downloaded Clubhouse to tune into a specific conversation. A friend texted me saying that the controversial San Francisco DA, Chesa Boudin, was live-debating a group of tech Twitter influencers. So I downloaded the app and frantically set up an account, and that first experience was magical. It felt like I had been invited to a private event, the convenience of a podcast with the unscripted magic of an impromptu conversation. 


The analogy to podcasts is an obvious one. Podcasts did to audio what blogs did to publishing. They lowered the barrier to production, creating a sea of more niche, more authentic audio content. They made audio more social before social audio.


MAYA: Podcasting was blowing up everywhere. Shows were being acquired by Spotify and Apple. And there was a lot of money being thrown that way. And I think, at the time, people were really, and we still are, people were really big into multitasking. And they wanted to be able to consume their content in a way that was sort of worked into their lifestyle. And so when you're commuting, and driving a car, and walking, and heading to the coffee shop, or whatever it is, like, you want to still be able to consume content. I don't know why we don't want to let our minds rest. We want to be able to still, you know, get some information in your head. 


And podcasting was really interesting because it sort of honored what's magical about radio, which is you can develop a sort of relationship with a radio host, and it feels like your personal friend. Even though you might not know each other, it just feels like this friend who talks about stuff that you're interested in, and they're really consistent, and podcasts sort of scaled that. 


So yeah, we were seeing a ton of trends in that way, and we thought about Twitter. Twitter was where the public conversation was held. And up until the point of audio coming onto the platform, that had to be done through text and through really short amounts of texts. And we wanted to change that, or we wanted to add on to that, I would say.


JAMES: So appetite for audio was increasing at a time when suddenly we're staying away from physical contact with other people. So you've got the perfect conditions for social audio to thrive. But why did Twitter want to wade into social audio? The raw material of Twitter is obviously text. At its core, it's a microblogging site, though you don't often hear it described that way anymore. What Maya made me realize is that, in many ways, Twitter was perfectly positioned to bring social audio to its user base since people already used Twitter to engage in real-time casual conversation. 


MAYA: For me, it was Real Housewives. I don't know how deep you are in the housewives world, but there's a lot of overlap with sports and housewives, I would say. 


JAMES: [laughs]


MAYA: But when the reunion happened, like, you had to have your Twitter open, and you'd like...you'd use the hashtag. And, like, you had to be plugged into the live conversation. It felt like a live conversation. And those were actually some of the examples we used when thinking about how audio could come alive on Twitter or why it would be important to customers of Twitter. 


[Playing an Audio Clip From Real Housewives of Potomac Reunion]


KAREN HUGER: I am obsessed with your clothing. Your taste sucks, but it's been very therapeutic in quarantine. 


GIZELLE BRYANT: Congratulations to Karen. Her Geritol just kicked in. 


ANDY COHEN: Did anyone bring any receipts?


JAMES: I asked Maya what services within Twitter and otherwise she drew from when designing Twitter Spaces.


MAYA: I think about the person and the people that are using it, less so the technology first. And so, like, there were definitely platforms that we could use as parallel experiences. There were plenty of live and streaming platforms. Periscope in and of itself had a lot of learnings. But more so, I was curious about the people who chose to use audio to connect with others, and so looking at how radio hosts what their behavior was like looking at DJs, and journalists, and TV journalists, and reporters on the ground who are going live. 


Like, we used and pulled from those sorts of narratives to understand why and how someone might use a product like this. What would happen if it was visual or not visual if it was just your audio? What things would they be able to do that they couldn't do already? Would they want to do it that way? 


So we really, really focused down on, like, what we called...we sort of grouped up all of these folks...(And podcasters were like a major inspiration too.) we grouped up all these people into what we called storytellers, natural storytellers, and hosts, people who know how to have a really engaging audio-based conversation; sometimes visuals are applied to that, sometimes not. What can we learn from them? And can we design the experience to sort of, like, honor that creativity but make it democratized for anyone to also participate?


JAMES: What's so interesting about the storytellers and hosts analogy, to me, is that it describes what Twitter was and is already good at distributing interesting stories and interesting people to other people who find them interesting and may want to jump into the conversation. We'll talk more about how Maya and the Spaces team brought the social audio feature to life right after the break. When it came to launching a social audio product, Maya and the team first had to build conviction that they actually wanted to launch something at all.


MAYA: I didn't actually believe in live audio at the time. I was super apprehensive about it. Like, why would somebody want to just let somebody else talk? Like, why would two people just want to, all of a sudden, talk to each other because of Twitter? And would that be safe? And, like, would the conversation be good? Who would want to listen to that? Like, [laughs] what's the point? 


And I remember myself, and Alex, who was my product peer at the time, and Rémy, who was the engineering lead, and Jack, who was the other designer, we got into, like, a ton of debate about it. And we went round and round and round because I just didn't get it for a second. We decided, number one, we just need to validate that audio is important to people within the context of a social platform like Twitter.


JAMES: So Twitter, obviously, has the natural advantage of a huge user base. But beyond Periscope, they didn't have much experience with audio. So Maya and the team decided to ship something small to wade into audio: voice tweets.


MAYA: So maybe the easiest way to do that would actually be to launch an asynchronous audio product, and that's why we did voice tweets. It was essentially just validating that people cared and how they might want to use it. But we always knew, like, we got a lot of pressure from our leadership, specifically Kayvon. And he was so right about this.


JAMES: Maya is talking about Kayvon Beykpour, formerly head of product at Twitter and the former CEO and co-founder of Periscope.


MAYA: Coming from that Periscope lens, like, it's obvious now, in hindsight, we needed to still consider live audio, and we really needed to figure that out. It just felt like such a big unknown to do, and implement, and change, and put into the Twitter product. Like, we wanted to sort of, like, step function it. 


And so then once we sort of validated through asynchronous audio that people were really excited about audio on Twitter, and also, there were some really important features that we needed to include that added fuel to us designing and shipping the synchronous audio Twitter Spaces.


JAMES: The other source of inspiration the Twitter team could draw from was obviously Clubhouse, which launched while they were busy designing Spaces.


MAYA: There was a bunch of decisions around how Twitter Spaces should feel and look. Clubhouse launching around the same time that we were having those discussions and having those debates was honestly perfect for us [laughs] because it meant that someone else could go out, be the first one. And I got to just witness, you know, what was resonating with people, how different design decisions would affect the behavior of people using a live product. Do people care? And the pandemic being a thing.


It just was, like, the right product at the right time, right place. And for us who had already been thinking about audio for a while before Clubhouse, it just, like, honestly lit a fire underneath our ass. And so one of the key differentiators that's really subtle, actually, between Clubhouse, at the time, and Twitter Spaces was I really felt like we needed to remove hierarchy as much as possible and actually make small design decisions to make it feel like people were having a conversation at an intimate dinner party. 


I wanted it to feel like even if you're a listener, or you're a speaker, or you're a host, that kind of matters, just for structure of conversation, but it should feel so comfortable that speakers are still giving the same tea that you are finding out on Clubhouse. But, like, listeners don't feel like, okay, I'm not in the in club, you know. It was, like, this really weird feeling that I would get when I was on Clubhouse where, like, you would get pulled up to the stage. And even the concept of a stage felt like, ugh, I don't want to talk on a stage. 


And so, like, instead of the stage, we sort of hid those controls as host and moderator controls of who could talk and who couldn't talk. But everyone was sort of flat with a bit of organization. And I really do feel like that helped de-emphasize this hierarchy, which promoted different sorts of conversation to take place.


JAMES: Twitter launched their voice tweets feature in 2020 for their iOS app. And in March 2021, they started beta-testing Spaces itself. So the team had plenty of time to examine what worked and didn't work about Clubhouse. As well as the exclusivity question, there were also questions around privacy and safety. 


MAYA: There were some really gross stuff going on with the types of content and the lack of safety features and how that influenced who got the mic and who didn't, and how women reporters were being harassed, anti-semitism, like, all those things. And, as a Black woman who is also Jewish, like, all of that was just like, oof, I don't...[laughs] like, what is this space? 


And then, the first step towards moderation from Clubhouse's perspective was this decision to either lock rooms or not lock rooms, like, have private or not private. So, like, people who had stuff to say that maybe wasn't super kosher, [laughs] just to put it lightly, they would just create private rooms. And, like, maybe that's fine, I don't know. 


But what it also did was it removed access to information and knowledge from a whole bunch of people who loved Clubhouse because they finally had access to these, like, A-list business people, finance people, celebrities, gurus, like, all of that was starting to dissolve. And so, like, the same people who are oftentimes left out of conversations and not respected in conversations that was happening again through particular design decisions. I was more so using Clubhouse to look at the psychology of all that and less so as a regular consumer, I would say.


JAMES: So the Twitter team is being bombarded with these considerations and also feedback on the voice tweets experiment they shipped.


MAYA: What happened was we shipped a minimal viable product, and it did not have transcriptions, which meant that anyone who was deaf or hard of hearing, like, literally could not consume that content. And we got that feedback loud and clear. Thank God, like, we did do that smaller experiment first, voice tweets. Because if we would have done that with live, tackle on, like, all of the safety concerns and moderation concerns, like, oh my God, like, we would have really been releasing something that was, frankly, dangerous to consumers, which was the opposite of what we wanted to do. 


So, after that learning, and after we got that loud feedback about the lack of accessibility features, we made a change internally and externally around how we were going to build products. I was part of that change, but it was sort of galvanized by Dantley, Kayvon, myself, Alex, Rémy, a bunch of other folks inside the company to ship things that were simple, lovable, complete. And completion usually meant everyone can participate. Your customers can participate. Your customers enjoy it. There might be some work to be done, but you're not causing harm, ideally. 


And so we decided, like, we're going to be really clear that what we're going to launch is a beta. And not only that, we're going to be really clear about who we are giving this beta to. And the people that we're going to give this beta to are people who are typically left out of experiments like this. And we're going to ask women and people from marginalized backgrounds to try it out first to tell us, are we missing anything? Is this a good product? Like, are there things that we hadn't considered? 


Because we knew that those demographics received, like, disproportionate abuse online, and so we cared about hearing from them first, as well as the storytellers that we talked about earlier, people who we knew would use this format in an interesting way. We wanted to hear all that feedback first. We weren't leaving out folks if they didn't hit those demographics, but we were just being intentional about making sure we were listening loud and clear to those folks, so the beta, who got the beta, how many people got the beta. 


And then also, like, in the design, there were, like, really core reporting and safety and blocking tools. We talked to our third-party policy advisors and showed them the product really early on and who don't sit internal to Twitter but, like, sort of, like, hold Twitter accountable at the time, showed them the product, got their feedback. 


So we really tried our best to arm ourselves and the product with the right features for people to keep themselves safe while knowing we still weren't going to get everything right. But I do think that that intentionality really allowed Twitter Spaces to feel different and for people to be more open to all the edges being not fully, like, smoothened out. Like, there were still some rough edges to stuff there. They were okay with that.


JAMES: There are so many interesting things about how Twitter launched Spaces. But the thing that stands out to me most is how elegantly they navigated the launch itself. It's easy to criticize a big tech company for shipping too fast and breaking too many things. And also easy to criticize a company for being paralyzed with responsibility and shipping nothing. 


What was so cool about the Twitter Spaces launch, to me, was they launched something which, in Maya's words, could have caused harm if designed incorrectly, but did so in a way that actively sought feedback from users to prevent that from happening. And, of course, they used Twitter to hold that conversation. Instead of launching the product via keynote, Maya and her team announced it themselves on Twitter.


MAYA: It was myself, Rémy, Alex, so the engineer, product manager, designer, the researcher, Danny, like, us who literally were the ones writing the tweets about this product, responding to customers in real-time, and standing on it. We're like; we built this. Let us know how you feel. There are some things we can and can't do. We still work for Twitter, right? Like, we're not an independent company. But, like, yeah, we are open ears. 


We're real people also on the other side of this product, so kind of talk to us like we're real people. But, like, you're not just yelling into a void. And even just that, like, putting ourselves out there in that way, changed the type of feedback that we were given and changed the investment from a customer's perspective into the Twitter Spaces product because they knew we were here to listen, and our roadmap would change based off of what they were saying to us.


JAMES: I remember feeling like that was really different, like, not just different from the perspective of a big company but also different for Twitter. Like, I feel like, and I may be misremembering, but I feel like prior to Spaces, the classic complaint about Twitter was, like, no new stuff, shipped really slowly. And this felt so substantively different, like, a huge new feature shipped in kind of this thoughtful but vulnerable way. How much was that sort of your team advocating for this being the right approach versus, like, a cultural shift at Twitter to, like, ship more and be more open?


MAYA: There was a really, like, specific way of working up until this point that didn't allow for a lot of that vulnerability and that, like, iterative product development. And so, yeah, no, things weren't getting developed quickly. They used Spaces as that case study to advocate for other products, so, like, our Communities product, some work in DMs, our creators' product like Twitter Blue. At the time, all those basically they built off of, like what the Spaces team did.


JAMES: Another question I really wanted to ask Maya was how she thought about Discovery. This was an area where I personally felt like Clubhouse fell short. There were those magic moments where you'd see a cool conversation happening in Clubhouse and drop everything to listen. But there were other times where I'd open the app, see if anything cool was going on, and couldn't really find anything to tune into, which meant that, over time, I opened the Clubhouse app less and less because my monkey brain didn't expect stimulation.


MAYA: Oh, man, Discovery almost sent me to my grave; I'm not going to lie. So when we first launched the product, we weren't particularly worried about that, on purpose, because we just wanted to, like, figure out the guts of how Spaces should work. One of the things, though, that we did upfront, and I did it during the voice tweets work, was created an interaction pattern where we adopted something very similar to Spotify. When you're listening to a song, and then you want to, like, go scroll and find another song, you just dock the song. It doesn't shut down. It just sits there at the bottom of your screen. 


I thought that, like, that might be an interesting interaction pattern for an audio product to hold on Twitter because actually, like, when you're listening to stuff, as we know from research, like, people want to multitask, and maybe they want to multitask on Twitter. And so maybe they want to scroll Twitter or DM friends, and that doesn't mean you should be kicked out of your Space. So if we were going to allow for Spaces to just always be laid on top of your Twitter experience, that essentially started to open up interesting ways to discover content or to loop content from Twitter into Spaces.


JAMES: Super interesting design decision. Twitter Spaces could easily have been a separate app like Clubhouse. But Maya and the team realized that participating in an audio space was just another form of the same type of interaction that users are already opening up the main Twitter app to take part in. 


In the episode with Chris Messina, we talked about the dinner party analogy of Twitter, where you can tap into any of the conversations going on around you. Spaces basically made that analogy real. Now, when you open Twitter, you have text threads and actual audio conversations happening, and you can move between the two. You can keep a Space open while you scroll your feed. You can paste tweets from your feed into a Space. 


This is such an elegant solution to the Discovery problem. In some ways, it's not a solution at all, though. Instead of ensuring there is always an interesting synchronous conversation to jump into, Twitter Spaces benefits from the fact that people are already spending a ton of time in the Twitter app engaging with people they like to hear from. There's already a graph, and there's already discovery happening. And Spaces enhance the job Twitter is already doing for those users.


MAYA: That feature being able to take a tweet from the timeline and put it into a Space was huge. Like, this was one of the main reasons why people started to use Spaces over Clubhouse outside of the audio.


One of the really big questions that I think designers have to think about within the context of social media apps is always, like, should this be a separate tab? Should this be a separate app? Should this be inside of a feed? Should it be a story? Like, there's a whole bunch of pros and cons to those decisions. 


I was stuck and also overwhelmed by all the other work that needed to be done with Spaces. I got to work with some other really talented designers to sort of flesh out what Spaces as its own tab could look like, and how that might affect the ecosystem, potentially what Spaces as its own standalone product could look like, and then what Spaces should look like if it was inside of the feed.


JAMES: If you want to see what some of those designs looked like in those early stages, check the show notes for this episode for a link to the Figma file containing work from the Spaces team. Sidenote, but the existence of this file itself is super cool to me. Instead of locking away learnings in a private Figma that only employees can benefit from, now anyone interested in social audio can use these for inspiration. Anyway, at the time I'm recording this episode, Spaces sits in its own feed, and it's easy to access. Just pull up the Twitter app and tap the center microphone icon.


MAYA: We decided not to do a separate app because we saw the Twitter graph being really important. Well, it felt too far out to think about the graph, the Twitter graph, being plugged into this separate app, and everyone finding use from it.


JAMES: One cool feature Maya designed for Spaces is the ability for the host to mute everyone, which can come in handy since Spaces, by design, can have a ton of listeners.


MAYA: Infinite amounts of people can come into a Space. That's the way that we built it a bit differently is, like, you can have hundreds of thousands of millions of concurrent listeners. Like managing that as a host as well as hosting a good conversation, is almost impossible. But even still, if you're going to let people up to speak, you need, like, a big, red button sometimes to be like, I'm shutting this down. 


Ultimately, we felt like hosts should have the tool to mute everyone, reset, get control of the room again to, like, again, reset that conversation. Have a safe, intimate, or interesting, fun, however, you want it, like, sort of conversation. You just needed the right tools that were simple but profoundly effective.


JAMES: What were your favorite, or spiciest, or most memorable Spaces [laughs] that you remember either being in or just hearing about?


MAYA: Some of the coolest Spaces, one, was, like, Spaces Got Talent hosted by Shaniah and Ant. They basically hosted this, like, talent show where [chuckles] they would pull people up who would, like, sing and like, you know, they would talk shit or praise them. And it was just really funny and, like, really took off, and they did it very regularly. 


Another one of my favorites was one between Jay-Z and DJ Khaled and a whole bunch of other people. And they [laughs] were, like, talking about one of the songs they did together. I think it was, like, GOD DID or something and just breaking down the music. And as a BeyHive member, by relation, I care about Jay-Z. So [laughs] I was like, oh my God, Jay-Z is using my product, which means maybe Beyoncé kind of knows that it happened, I don't know. 


I had the opportunity to have a call with Jay, me and some of the team did. And he, like, talked about Spaces and how cool it was, and he was, like, really kind. And that was sort of, like, the Hallmark moment of my career thinking about, like, what young Maya wanted out of product design and tech. And I remember saying to my husband, "I think I'm good. Like, I can go and be done. I can retire." [laughs] Like, that was cool enough for me to be kind of done. Yeah, those definitely stick out in my mind.


JAMES: As we ended, I wondered if there was anything Maya might have done differently with Spaces, knowing how everything played out, as well as her thoughts of how social audio may evolve in the future.


MAYA: I do think that I wish I was able to slow down time a bit. The massive scaling of the team and the shifting of my role from, like, the only IC designer on Spaces to now a design lead of 7 and the team growing to 100 people inside of product and outside of product, it was a lot. And it made it so...it wasn't quite as fun anymore. And I was ready for, like, a new challenge. Looking back, I miss the team, and I miss that problem space.


JAMES: Was social audio a pandemic thing, in your view, or does it have staying power?


MAYA: I think that it will be a feature that exists and maybe like a product, but it's not the primary way of engaging with everybody, like, engaging with your entire social network, which is essentially what Spaces and Clubhouse is. It's like using social audio, synchronous audio to engage with your entire audience all the time. Probably not. 


I do think that it's a feature that you want to have at times when you have announcements or, like, something big is happening, or you want to connect with your customers, or jam with your friends, or, like, a reunion on The Real Housewives of Potomac is happening. Maybe I want to, like, [laughs] tune into a Space like that, like, I would love that. 


But every day, I don't know, probably not. But the way that products, social products are headed is very different than what...it's kind of like everything everywhere all at once. Like, that's how it feels. And social audio is a feature inside of this massive web of, like, customizable features that every single person will have to be able to tap into when it makes more sense for them.


JAMES: That was Maya Gold Patterson, former Lead Product Designer on Twitter Spaces. Today, Maya is the VP of Design Riverside.fm. 


Thank you for listening to Happy Paths. For more information about the show, visit us at commandbar.com/happypaths, or you could send us a Tweet @CommandBar. 


This podcast is executive produced by Maurice Cherry, with engineering and editing from Mandy Moore. Special thanks to Maya and, of course, the entire team at Command Bar. I'm James Evans, and this is Happy Paths. See you next time.