Project Goals
i.e. Why did you do this project, Jennifer?
The goals of this project were largely for personal growth. After designing at several B2B startups, I was often isolated from users and relied on designing with assumptions.
The primary goals of this project were to test my assumptions by speaking to users when it made sense to inform my interaction design decisions.
Outcome
Throughout the project, I spoke to users at three stages of the design process: facilitating user research, concept testing with low-fidelity wireframes, and usability testing with medium-fidelity prototypes.
The outcome was three iterations of the feature.
Background
I enjoy finding new music to listen to. For instance, when an artist releases a new album or a friend recommends an interesting track.
However, I’m not always in the mood to listen to something new. There are days I’d rather have Taylor Swift on repeat than listen to the new Black Country, New Road with 4298 experimental sounds.
So now I have to record the name of the album and its artist with the intention of listening to it later.
How can we help users keep track of music they intend to listen to?
Solution
Save music
Save music you intend to listen to into a 'Listen later' list. Organize this music into categories.
Search and filter
Search and filter from music saved into ‘Listen later’ to rediscover music that fits your current mood and interested genres.
Track listening progress
Motivate users to listen to saved music with a visual representation of listening progress.
Research & Definition
i.e. why the heck do we need this feature?
User goal
Not everyone listens to music the same way. Let’s define our user as a music connoisseur.
These are users who actively search for new music to listen. The goal of a music connoisseur is to experiment. This means listening to music from a variety of artists or genres.
Current experience
Popular music streaming apps such as Spotify are great at supporting playlist creation; however, the primary purpose of a playlist is to contain music the user is already familiar with.
As a result, users must find workarounds to keep track of music they intend to listen to. The easiest workaround is to create one long list. Workarounds imply that music streaming apps currently do not fulfill user needs.
Turns out, we need this feature because the current experience did not fulfill user needs.
User research
What makes the current experience insufficient to user needs?
The current experience is not robust enough to support the scale and variety of music our users intend to listen to. The goal of our users is to experiment. This means a typical list of music for our users will a) be extensive and b) have a lot of variety.
The current experience is overwhelming. As users continue to add music to their list, it increases in scale and becomes increasingly difficult to decide what music to listen to.
The current experience is demotivating. Experimenting with music is requires active and intentional listening, It is easier to listen to music that the user is already familiar with. Staring at one long to-do list is dejecting.
Ideation
I used user stories to ideate on the research insights.
The First Iteration
Wireframes & concept testing
What did I learn after concept testing these wireframes?
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Users use album covers to decide what to listen to
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What a user wants to listen to is dependent on their mood
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Users want to organize music into categories but the categories themselves vary all the time (can be by genre, mood, artist, etc.)
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Increase the card size of albums
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Add search & filter by mood functionality
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Create a robust organization system by letting users categorize their own music
The Second Iteration
Medium-fidelity prototypes & usability testing
What did I learn after usability testing these prototypes?
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Progress tracking language is confusing, which makes progress difficult to interpret
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Users are unsure what to expect when tracks are shuffled — i.e. what order would they play in?
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Redesign progress tracking with more explicit language
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Provide visual feedback to user when they tap ‘Shuffle play’
The Third Iteration
Refinement & interaction design
Refining progress tracking
Tabs were used with explicit in progress, not started, and listened labels.
Refining shuffle play
A queue was added to provide visual feedback and let the user know what order tracks would be played when ‘Shuffle play’ was tapped.
Refining categories
When users make categories, it is important to be able to add both albums and individual tracks. Robust organization systems for users would accommodate both.
Albums and tracks differed in appearances, which created some visual imbalance. A toggle was added so users can list albums as a group of tracks or track-by-track, which helped with visual imbalance.
Refining language
From a branding perspective, the language for “category” also needed some refining. A few options were explored.
If this project was shipped...
Metrics
How will we know if we have successfully fulfilled user needs?
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How many hours do users listen to new music?
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How diverse are the genres and artists users to?
Collaboration
If I were to collaborate with engineers on this project, what questions would I ask?
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How can we group music by mood?
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What kind of user listening data can we collect?
Learnings
Refinement is an iterative process
When I was designing my second iteration of prototypes, I had no idea that there would be more iterations. I thought I was moving into high-fidelity prototyping but in the end, this iteration was definitely more medium fidelity. I learned to trust the process and really felt that user testing was what challenged my craft and interaction design skills. Without it, I would have stopped after my second iteration with an end product that was less refined.