Product Autopsy: Social audio app space [Clubhouse]
Clubhouse’s post-peak problem: From viral audio rooms to sustainable retention. Live audio + community redesign with prototypes
The ‘Autopsy’ series is my attempt to pick a real-life product, pick problems its users are facing / what needs it is not fulfilling, suggest features and design wireframes and prototype for the same. Let’s dive!
The magic and the crash
Clubhouse was the app of the pandemic: spontaneous live conversations, intimate rooms, and the thrill of bumping into strangers who felt strangely familiar through voice. It promised something deeper than polished posts or one‑way podcasts -a space where people could just talk and be heard. But as the world opened up, its shine faded, and many users quietly drifted away.
When this product teardown started, my first step was simple: download the app and experience it like any new user today. The moment onboarding finished, the welcome was not warm; it was chaotic. A random, noisy room started auto‑playing in a language that felt completely unfamiliar, instantly creating distance instead of connection. That first 30 seconds told a bigger story about why Clubhouse struggles to stay relevant now.
Where the experience breaks down
Spending more time inside the app reveals a pattern of tiny paper cuts that add up to real frustration.
- Onboarding feels shallow: Interests and context are barely understood, so recommendations often shove users into irrelevant rooms with random topics and languages.
- Notifications are overwhelming and hard to control; even with most toggles turned off, users still complain about unwanted pings and auto‑play audio that suddenly blasts at odd hours.
- The interface feels cluttered: live rooms, replays, clubs, and “people you might know” blur into an endless hallway that is especially painful for screen‑reader users or anyone seeking something specific.
User reviews call out issues like broken login flows, region limitations, missing accessibility, audioless rooms, and even the inability to properly deactivate accounts. Underneath the UX issues is a deeper product problem: Clubhouse is trying to be everything at once, while competitors like Discord, Twitter Spaces, and LinkedIn Audio each win by anchoring around clear use cases and community structures.
Reimagining Clubhouse for real people
So what would it look like if Clubhouse was rebuilt less as a hype product and more as a place users actually want to come back to? The proposed direction focuses on making the experience personalized, discoverable, safe, and seamless.
- Smarter onboarding: ask about interests, language, and preferred formats, then shape the first hallway around that -no more being dropped into random chaos.
- Live vs replay clarity: clear filters and tabs separating live rooms from replays, plus smart tags and categories so users can find exactly the kind of room they are in the mood for.
- Accessibility and simplicity: larger touch targets, reduced clutter, “minimal mode” to hide replays or random clubs, and layouts that work better with screen readers.
On top of this UI layer, better moderation and safe spaces become non‑negotiable: visible safety scores for rooms, one‑tap reporting, “safe space” filters, and clear indicators when a room is AI‑ or community‑moderated. Focusing on the people who keep coming back
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Clubhouse’s best shot at a second life lies with a specific group: knowledge professionals and creators. These are people who:
- Host recurring sessions around careers, upskilling, or niche topics and want tools to grow and retain their audience.
- Care about credibility — badges, verified profiles, and speaker highlights that signal expertise.
- Need clear monetization paths like ticketed sessions, tips, subscriptions, or sponsored rooms.
Measuring what actually matters
If Clubhouse leans into this redesigned experience, the metrics also need to shift from vanity to depth. The proposed North Star is the Live Room Join Rate per session — how often users quickly find and join a relevant, “live now” room every time they open the app. Alongside that, supporting metrics look at room join CTR, time to first join, filter usage, session length in filtered rooms, and user satisfaction with discovery.
In that version of Clubhouse, opening the app would not feel like being thrown into a random noisy party — it would feel like walking into a room where the conversation already understands who you are and why you showed up.
Here is a prototype and analysis deck. Let me know your thoughts or what you’ll like to read more!
What’s Next?
I’m transitioning from software engineering to product management. This case study is my way of thinking like a PM -understanding user behavior, not just code. Here is my portfolio where I’ll be collating more similar stories.
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