We designed and built a new digital home for Stuff You Should Know, with a persistent player, AI-powered episode search, and a tour calendar the team can manage themselves.
Stuff You Should Know is one of the most-listened-to podcasts in the world, with a back catalog approaching 2,000 episodes. We rebuilt their digital platform around three ideas: a persistent audio player that follows users across the site, AI-powered search that lets fans find episodes by topic, and a tour calendar the team can manage without a developer.
Stuff You Should Know had a vast, global audience and a growing back catalog, but the digital experience hadn’t kept up. Fans couldn’t easily find episodes by topic. The site wasn’t synced to the podcast feed, so the team manually updated listings. Tour dates were a headache to publish. And there was no unified way for a listener to move between episodes, live shows, and merch without losing their place.
The brief: give SYSK a digital home that matches the scale and sophistication of the show itself.
We designed an audio player that stays anchored to the bottom of the screen as users navigate the site. You can start an episode on the homepage, browse tour dates, read show notes, and the audio keeps playing without interruption. On mobile, it collapses into a minimal dock that expands on tap.
With 2,000 episodes, keyword search wasn’t enough. Most episode titles are intentionally playful and don’t describe the content. We used AI to tag every episode with topic, themes, and key subjects, then built a search experience around those tags. A fan looking for “the one about dreams” or “the episode on Chernobyl” finds it in one query.
Touring is a huge part of SYSK’s business, and the previous site required a developer to update tour dates. We built a custom tour management interface inside WordPress so the team can add, edit, and archive dates themselves, with automated publishing to the site.
The SYSK team now publishes tour dates in minutes instead of filing a developer ticket. Fans can find episodes by topic for the first time in the show’s history. A search query like “the episode on octopuses” returns the right result on the first try. The site’s bounce rate dropped substantially after launch, and the team has been updating episode content themselves for over a year without developer involvement.
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