Project Brief

A lot of people depend on music streaming services for their entertainment. During open-ended research, it was revealed that a lot of regular users feel that while searching they end up forgetting the song name and felt frustrated. I’ll be walking you through the case study, explaining how I came up with a solution for the problem.

Target audience

Current music streaming customers who are looking for options to connect to the world through music.

My Goal

To bring a new way of listening to music and connect with music application, driven by market research and customer interviews.

My Role

Product Design, UX/UI Design, User Research, Information Architecture, Prototyping, Usability Testing.

Constraints

• I had to decide between Spotify, Apple Music etc., & follow their design ideology, UI patterns and ensure that the feature finds a logical place within the information architecture.
• No real-time interaction with people for research and usability testing due to covid-19.

Research

Before starting with the Design Process.
I brainstormed on these questions:

• Why this feature of AR and voice searching is needed?
• What impact it will create and how it will be beneficial for the business and users? and why customers chose one service over another.

The research was done with 3 people through a 1:1 video call, working in small to large companies across India to diversify the research.

Referred Research Papers

https://sci.tamucc.edu/~cams/projects/523.pdf

— Recent studies confirm that humans respond and react to music and that music has a high impact on a person’s brain activity. People tend to listen to music based on their mood and interests. This project focuses on creating an application to suggest songs for the user based on their mood by capturing facial expressions.

http://jackdawresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Jackdaw-Research-Music-Survey-Report.pdf

— Jackdaw Research commissioned two surveys recently to better understand music consumption habits and focus on understanding how people are using Music.

Competitive Analysis

Discovering the size of the music streaming industry, the differences between various streaming services customers bases, and which directions the industry was headed in were some of the goals of the competitor research I conducted. I wanted to understand why certain customers chose their favourite platforms, and why they left some of them.

User Interviews

User interviews for this project began during the Covid-19, so most research was conducted over Google meet calls, and recorded. There was one round of interviews for this phase of the project.

Research Goals | All participants were customers of at least one music streaming service

• Discover the participants’ habits regarding music listening, sharing of music, their history of using different music streaming services, and if they used any social features on these platforms
• Understand why the participants chose certain platforms over others
• Really get to the heart of how and why participants listen to music

Research Findings

• Users are frustrated when they forget the song name and find by lyrics and not finding the song. They find it clumsy and think it has too many times.
• Convenience made users happy. A lot of things they liked about the app were based around a process being simplified or gathered in one place according to their mood and emotion.

After distributing user surveys, conducting user interviews, and discovering common user goals and pain points, I determined a useful feature add would be a “notification” section showing all of the new releases and tour dates of the user’s favourite artists in one easy to access location, with the option of sending push-notifications when an artist releases new music or announces a concert near the user’s location. My user research backs this up:

• People find out about new releases in a somewhat fragmented way
• People find out about show dates in a very fragmented way
• Some people in my interviews expressed frustration about missing shows or new releases simply because they got lost in the noise or didn’t remember to seek out this info on their own.

User Persona

After the interviews, I created a User Persona of Ramya based on the market research and interviews I conducted. Ramya is like many Indians. She is an avid music consumer, likes going to see live music, listens to music while she’s at work and also a Dancer who is planning to open her own dance school. She wishes she could have more emotions attached to music.

Once I created Ramyas’ persona, I spent some time drawing up an Empathy Map. I spent some time thinking about, how will a day in Ramyas’ life look like.

Problem Statement

To take a better look at the research findings I had, I made a list of problem statements. With each statement, I tried to articulate the problems that I had uncovered. Once I had that list, I selected the problems that I thought would be best to try and solve within the scope of the project. Before narrowing the list down to one problem to solve, I did a few rounds of Wireframing.

Ideation & Brainstorming

Setting a timer for twenty minutes per page, I did several rounds to help me envision some of these problems, I was working on. This process helped me start thinking about how I might create solutions for the problems at hand, without judgement over the quality of the design work.

User flow

The new challenge is to figure out how and where I can place the new features into the product in a way that makes sense and doesn’t break with Music’s existing design patterns.

Usability Testing

To help me with the UI design, I created a basic UI kit for the app containing examples like typography, colour palette, icons, button styles, and design patterns. I continued to build the key screens out into a testable user flow, I conducted usability testing for the new features with two participants, aged 25–30.

They were given the following task to complete:

• Go to search and open the emotion scanner.
• Listen to the album.
• Open lyrics of the song and sing along and upload or share with their friends.

I was anticipating an 80% error-free rate in the testing. I anticipated there being a few issues with participants having different ways to navigate through the app, so they might click on a few non-functioning tabs and menus.

User Interface Design

I iterated different layouts and improved the visuals designs based on the numerous feedback that I received.

I choose Green to be the brand colour for my app.

Results

What I’ve learned from this project

— This project taught me how to work within the constraints of a product and design within an existing system, relying on already present design patterns. Since users are already familiar with these conventions, breaking with them could hurt usability.

— One challenge I overcame during research was learning how to gain insight into what users need without asking them directly (“What feature do you wish this app had?”), since that leads to simply wishful thinking and a lot of “it would be cool if the app did this” responses. Indirectly feeling out for user pain points is a more effective method of learning what problems users need to be solved and how to best solve them.

Thank you for reading till the end! Did you know? You can hold the clap button for a few seconds to give a maximum of 50 claps. I would really appreciate it

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