INTUITIVE MUSIC APP
A Design of the Ideal Music Streaming App
SUMMARY
Music defines each person differently, but not all music streaming apps reach each person's needs. Our group of three tackled the problem of creating an ideal music streaming app based off of popular platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora, and Youtube. Over the course of a month, our team would create a working prototype of two user scenarios. Through interviewing and a competitive analysis, we were able to understand the workflow of these four apps. While Spotify has an attractive and popular appearance,we identified a lack of functionality that the other apps excelled in. Our final product combined the navigation from Spotify, the user feedback from Pandora, and the playlist curation from Apple Music.
SCOPE
Role: UX Designer, UX Researcher
Date: November 2016 - December 2016
Skills: Interviewing, Competitive Analaysis, Prototyping, Wireframing
Tools: Lookback, Google Slides, Google Sheets
Deliverable: Interactive wireframe of new music app
PROCESS
User Interviews and Personas
Our group interviewed nine users spanning Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora, and Youtube while using the platform Lookback. Lookback allowed our group to be able to record User Interface experience visually and auditorily. We were interviewing the users to find how they create a playlist and manage playlist within their respective apps as well as to identify what features they like and dislike.
From that qualitative data, our group created user personas and scenarios. These scenarios explained specific situations that each user would create or manage playlist. For example, one Spotify user creates a playlist for certain time periods while an Apple Music user manages his playlists by ordering the flow of the songs. We needed to create these personas and scenarios in order to understand the purpose and reasoning behind each user's playlist formation and curation.
User app preference
WORKFLOW OF APPS
After stepping in the shoes of our users, we then compared the workflow between the four apps. An example of this process is as follows:
Comparing the user's ability to delete a song off of a playlist from Pandora and Spotify, there is a clear distinction that Pandora's process is simpler. Not only can the User delete a song in a shorter path, but Pandora also confirms that the user has deleted the song. Additionally, Pandora allows for temporary deletions producing a novel experience for the user. Spotify’s mobile app is confusing in this regard, as well as a clear breach of consistency and standards, since the user is used to seeing only one “Delete” button on the right in most apps. While the process is easier to perform, it is more difficult to explain and deduce which button is which.
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
Before designing our new app, we wanted to understand how each app navigates through its pages by documenting the site maps. I created the Apple Music Site map to the right. These site maps allowed our group to compare the three apps navigation bars in order to outline the most important and needed parts of a music streaming app on every single page.
After closer consideration through a deep dive and the competitive analysis, we designed a navigation bar that mimics Spotify's closely, with the exception of changing the word "browse" to "discover". Although this decision is small, our group wanted to visualize how users could learn new music like in Pandora effortlessly.
OUr Final Product
Create a Playlist Scenario Design
We decided to include a pop-up that felt like Spotify’s pop-up because we liked the fact that the app kept the user on the same page while creating a playlist instead of involuntarily taking them to their library. We also mimicked their flow because we felt it involved the least amount of steps that could be taken to create and add music to a playlist. However, we diverged from Spotify with the layout and wording of the pop-up, as seen. We felt that Spotify’s “save” option was too vague, and so then opted for the more specific label “Save to Library Songs”. We also wanted to display all of the options that the pop-up allowed, rather than making the user scroll to find them. Our pop-up allows the user to create a new playlist as well as add a song to an existing playlist for more user choice. It also allows them to go to the album of the song they are saving, or the artist. We included these choices, instead of “Share” or “Add to Up Next”, because we felt these options better reflected the flexibility of the app and allowed the user to easily find more similar music for their playlists. We wanted to improve the functionality of Spotify’s confirmation when adding a song to a playlist, and this we did by giving the user the choice of closing the confirmation or going to the playlist. This was a huge talking point in our interviews, with arguments for and against the functionality of Spotify’s confirmation. Ours does not fade away, like Spotify’s confirmation message, but does let the user pick whether they would like to choose to go back to the “Jazz” page, or to go to the newly created (or ongoing) playlist to get a good overview of what they are creating. We felt this would enable the user to access the playlist at any point in time while creating it and adjust their vision for the playlist accordingly.
Manage a Playlist Scenario Design
We made a few design decisions that we thought improved over the functionality of Spotify. Spotify makes the user click a button on the top right of the screen in order to even get to the pop-up menu with the edit option in it. “Edit” takes the user to the “delete” option to the left of the song. In comparison and in contrast to this, we put an “edit” button in the top right corner of the screen on any playlist to eliminate the need for the pop up menu and to specify exactly what the function of the buttons in the corner were. That edit button came from Apple Music, which displays it prominently in pink in the top right corner of their app. We felt that this choice was user-friendly, in that it guided the user toward managing their music collection effortlessly and pointedly without making them guess how to edit the playlist. We also improved our editing task by including an “add music” button all through the editing process. This was also a departure from Spotify’s delete only model, and we made the choice to include it because we didn’t want to preclude the user from adding to a playlist as well as deleting, and wanted to keep both management options easily in view on the same screen. After deliberation and looking back at our user interviews for feedback on the process of deleting a song from Spotify (as some interviewees thought that the two “delete” buttons were too detailed a process), we reluctantly included them when we realized that the process of clicking on the button on the left and then confirming the button on the right provided much needed room for user error. In case of the user accidentally clicking on the “delete” button, a second “delete” option pops up on the opposite side of the screen to confirm that this is in fact what the user wants to do. However, our app also differs and improves upon Spotify’s model by showing the user a confirmation model to ensure that they know the process of deleting that song has completed.
