Simplifying Music Lover’s Path to New Tracks
EUPHONY WEBSITE DESIGN
Figma, Figjam, Teams
TIMELINE
Feb - Apr 2024, Revisited: Sept - Nov 2024
TOOLS
ROLE
UX Designer
Having Trouble Finding New Music? Let Euphony Guide You.
Overview
Euphony is a music recommendation website that helps users discover new songs based on their existing music preferences. This online platform aims to assist music enthusiasts in curating personalized playlists and exploring new artists and genres.
Our team of four collaborated to develop this website using the Goal-Directed Design (GDD) method. By incorporating research-backed features and thoughtful design, we've created a well-crafted music discovery service.
Prioritizing the Users By Utilizing Goal-Directed Design
Methodology
To ensure a user-centric approach, we employed Goal-Directed Design (GDD) to identify our users' goals, needs, and motivations before developing the product. This approach enabled us to gain a deep understanding of the domain and its users, ensuring that Euphony was designed with the user in mind.
Due to the limited time of the 16-week university course, we tailored GDD to suit our time frame and incorporated the following stages of GDD:
Modified Steps of GDD
Market Research
Foundation of Music Listening, Recommendation Systems, and Music Listeners
Once we had our methodology down, it was time to do some research. We kicked things off by taking a good look at the music recommendation market (literature review) and potential competitors (competitive analysis), searching for ways we could lay down a solid foundation for Euphony.
There were four main topics we researched for the literature review: the foundations of music listening, music recommendation systems, why music listeners lose the willingness to listen to new types of music as they age, and the importance of music diversity. We had three main takeaways from our research:
As people age, they have less free time to spend searching for new music; users should be able to get music recommendations quickly.
Music listeners often don’t understand what type of music they like; we need to show what type of music they like and why.
People often get stuck in an echo chamber of only listening to one genre of music; we need to give users the ability to get recommendations that are different from what they usually listen to.
Literature Review
Competitive Audit
Competitors often make it overly complicated to get recommendations based on a user’s existing playlist.
Obscurify does a great job of using “mood” to describe to users what type of music they like the most.
Competitors don’t allow for recommendations based on custom inputs.
For our audit, we looked at four competitors: last.fm, Everynoise, Indie Shuffle, and Obscurify. By doing this, we were able to identify a range of potential rivals in the music recommendation industry, learned what competitors implemented to make their app successful, and determined ways to improve our app by addressing areas that competing apps lacked. Here’s what we learned:
Obscurify Mood Section
User Research Interviews
How Do Real People Want To Discover New Music?
Now that we had researched the market and potential competitors it was time to talk to potential users to figure out the best way to make Euphony as useful and user-friendly as possible.
Before we could conduct user interviews we needed to establish who our potential users are by developing a persona hypothesis. We believed our main users would likely be users who would be tech-savvy and value interconnected experiences. They would be willing to invest time in onboarding processes and linking accounts to extract the maximum benefits from the app. Their preferences would include personalized recommendations, collaborative features, and in-depth information about genres and artists.
Persona Hypothesis
Using our persona hypothesis as a basis, we recruited acquaintances and friends that we thought had the characteristics and background we were looking for. Some of these characteristics included: listens to music frequently, wants to expand their music taste, wants to gain a better understanding of what types of music they like and why.
Interviewees
With interviewees found we were ready to begin the interviews. These interviews took place over a week and were conducted online using Microsoft Teams. In these interviews, the design team asked interviewees questions about the role music played in their lives, how they listened to music, how they discovered new music, if they understood what types of music they liked, and how they would ideally discover new music.
Interviews
During the interview process, we observed common and differing traits among the participants. To help us organize our interviewee’s qualities and traits we created affinity maps after each interview by noting down significant characteristics, thoughts, observations, and behaviors that we gathered from the interview. We then reviewed all the sticky notes and grouped together those that shared similarities. As a result, we had clusters of sticky notes that captured the key takeaways from each participant.
Affinity Mapping
Interviewee #1 Affinity Map
Through conducting five interviews and affinity mapping our observations, we were able to gain valuable insights into the participants' personal philosophies and behaviors when it comes to finding new music. These were our key observations:
Participants wanted to be able to find new music that is similar to what they already listen to and slightly different music to expand their music taste.
Four of the five participants wanted to learn more about what types of music they like and why they like it.
Participants who had a Spotify account were eager to see a breakdown of their music listening stats similar to Spotify’s Wrapped.
Observations
Persona Development
Now that we had wrapped up our interviews, it was time to develop a persona. This process consisted of compiling findings from our five interviews, analyzing said findings, and grouping our participants based on their behavioral variables.
Hardcore vs Casual Music Listeners
Based on our observations of the user interviews we came up with 17 behavioral variable scales in which we would place the interviewees.
After placing each interviewee on the behavior scales it became clear that we had two patterns forming; one pattern leaned towards more hardcore music listeners and the other to more casual listeners.
Behavioral Variables
Grouped Behavioral Variables
For this group of people, music plays a large role in their lives. They consider music one of their biggest hobbies and are more knowledgable when it comes to music. They are actively listening to music on Spotify with premium looking for new tunes to jam out to. They aren’t afraid to get deep into sub genres looking for the perfect songs for them.
Hardcore Music Listener
This group of people largely listen to music passively. They typically listen to a station or shuffle a playlist of Spotify while doing other things like studying or going for a walk. One of the main differences between the casual vs the hardcore group is that the casual group doesn’t pay to listen to music. Instead they opt for free versions of Spotify, YouTube, or Pandora to get their music fix.
Casual Music Listener
Introducing our personas: Ralph Lendo and Martha Stover. Ralph, a 24-year-old audio producer from Atlanta deeply into vinyl collecting and music festivals, seeks to expand and better understand his music taste while integrating seamlessly with his apps to converse about music effortlessly. His afternoons involve exploring record stores and local music scenes for new sounds, but he struggles with personalized music discovery on platforms like Spotify.
Meanwhile, Martha, a 48-year-old dental hygienist from Alpharetta, desires a simpler way to discover new music reminiscent of old favorites without cumbersome sign-up processes. She turns to YouTube to find recommendations that align with her musical preferences, aiming to navigate the vast musical landscape more comfortably.
Personas
Primary Persona
Secondary Persona
Designing
From Lo-fi Wireframes to Hi-fi Prototype
After we developed the Persona we made a requirements list based on the needs of the personas. With the requirements list created, we were ready to get designing.
The team decided to take to marker and whiteboard to get the wireframe started. Here we drew out the most essential screens for the prototype laying out the basis for the rest of the design.
After our whiteboard wireframe was complete, we recreated it in Figma and added the rest of the necessary screens to complete our low-fi wireframe
Wireframe
Whiteboard Wireframe
To make sure that our design had a consistent look and feel throughout the prototype, we started this process by creating a design system consisting of font styles, color palettes, and a relative 8-point grid. We focused on making the Euphony prototype have a colorful but clean dark-mode aesthetic, so that it would appeal largely to all demographics of music listeners. We also emphasized keeping the layout constant as to not confuse users.
Prototyping
Prototype Canvas (Figma)
Usability Testing
Working Out the Kinks
User Testing
Now that we had finished the first iteration of the prototype it was time to test it with potential users to see how it held up. To gather evidence in which we could use to refine our prototype, we conducted two usability tests.
These tests were carried out virtually on Teams similar to the user research interviews. During these tests, we had a list of tasks for the participant to complete using the Euphony prototype. Participants were asked to follow the think-aloud protocol and speak their thoughts aloud to help us better understand their decision-making process.
Based on the participant’s actions and feedback we concluded the following:
First time users felt like they should be given an easier welcome to the site instead of being thrown in the discovery page. Based on this, we added an opening landing page to ease the users in and giving them a simple call-to-action.
Landing Page For Non Signed-In Users
Original Landing Page
Search Page - Second Iteration
History Section
Interviewees wanted to know what songs they had recently listened to. Based on this, we decided to add a history section to show users what songs they have listened to on the site.
History Section
Final Prototype
Euphony: Find New Music Based On What You Love
Based on our market research, user interviews, usability tests, and more, we were finally able to complete Euphony: a music recommendation website with the main goals of helping users find new music they will love and help users understand why they like the music they enjoy.
Reflection
My Final College Project
Upon completing this project, my group and I felt that we developed a final product that brought us all a sense of pride.
This experience highlighted the value of user research and keeping user goals at the forefront of design. It enabled us to design a product that catered to our user’s needs and delivered a satisfying experience. Working alongside a motivated team to create our product, from research to prototype, was a gratifying experience that made all the ups and downs worthwhile.
There were many lessons that I learned throughout this experience. Here are some examples of these lessons:
Finding the right users to interview is one of the (if not the most) important parts of user research.
A design can only be as good as the design system it is made within.
Usability testing is essential because users have different perspectives than designers.
Keeping user goals at the forefront of the design is the best to create a user-friendly product.
Lessons Learned
~ fin ~
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