With the plethora of music apps currently out there, listening to music we want has never been easier, and in todays connected society, listening to music often goes beyond the individual.
Through our interviews, we found that many people rely on messaging apps to share their music, but many of these apps currently provide a sub-optimal experience for this purpose.
Soundroom is a centralized messaging platform that strives to bring the music community together by allowing social networks to share and play music in their own "soundrooms”.
Explore and share music with your friends in public or private chatrooms, and easily keep track of shared songs and comments all in one place
We began the research process by first finding out how people share music in general and their motivations for sharing them.
We conducted 5 user interviews and through our research, we discovered that the young generation are quick to go online through a messaging app to share music with their friends from a given music source in order to share interests, find out new songs quickly, and organize social events.
From our research, we created a persona and an empathy map to better understand our users and the potential product we are creating.
Gabriel Cooper is a college student who has a big passion for music. He constantly wants to find out the latest songs and often goes to music concerts or raves with his friends when popular artists drop by the local area.
After having a concrete understanding of who we were designing for, we also needed a concrete idea of what we were designing. We narrowed down our focus problem through a series of POV statements.
Then we ran through a few Crazy 8s to quickly generate ideas on how we would solve the “How Might We” statements we came up with earlier. We chose one idea, a centralized messaging app with a sole focus on sharing music, and created a quick storyboard of the users journey and the screens they would see.
Now that we defined a concept to solve our problem, it was time to realize the idea. We used Sketch to create a site map of the app, a user flow, and low-fidelity wireframes of what the app would look like.
After we had our key screens wireframed, we put together a prototype in Invision and conducted in-person usability test with several participants to test our user flow.
We learned a great deal from our participants and the usability test. We found that our initial design lacked context and weren't sure what a "soundroom" was. Users also had trouble creating and sharing a soundroom as the flow was not as intuitive as it could be.
However, we found that once they were given some background knowledge on what the app was used for, they had a relatively easy time creating a sound room and sharing a song. This reflects the need for an onboarding process for this app common for first time users. However, because I was trying to test a key feature of creating a sound room and sharing songs, I should have narrowed the scope of the usability test by giving more information up front of what the usability test was.
We took the insights that we received and iterated on our prototype. After many iterations, we proceeded to create a full mock-up of Soundroom and added the styling and visual design to the app.
Designing SoundRoom was an invaluable experience for me with a lot of takeaways. First, I learned to really trust in the UX process from the research all the way to the testing, none of it should be overlooked. With so many pieces to keep in mind as a UX designer especially in a big problem space, its really easy to go off in one direction or to focus directly on the solutions first without narrowing down the problem.
This project allowed me to learn the ins and outs of the process and allowed me to know my own workflow process better, so that I can be a more efficient problem-solver and strategist moving forward.
From this project, I had validated that the sound room was a easy way to share and talk about music. However, from the usability testing, it showed that many users had little understanding of what the app was at the beginning, so I would create an onboarding process to let first time users understand what sound room is and the value to be gained from it I would also explore other features such as exporting and sharing playlists into other apps or features such as invitation links that would promote the network effect necessary for online community apps such as this one.
A grocery store franchise wants to expand their online presence. I designed the information architecture and created responsive wireframes for their new online store.
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