COGS 187a Music App Redesign

As part of a course I’m currently taking, we were challenged to create a very basic prototype for a music app, with the goal of improving upon some of the preexisting user experience flaws other popular music apps had in regards to playlists and their functions. My group, consisting of myself and three other peers, conducted user research and interviews, looked at competitive analysis, and finally created a prototype that addressed some of the problems that we encountered in other apps.

To begin, we first needed to gain more insight into the problem at hand: what exactly were the flaws in the music apps that everyone uses? Because pretty much everyone listens to music in some shape or form, our target audience was relatively wide, but we chose to focus our research mainly on college students our age (19–22). Our group decided to split up and interview people separately, coming up with a list of key questions to ask that included the following:

Once we had these results compiled, we quickly came to the realization that of all the music apps our users described, Spotify was by far the most used and most complete in terms of its playlist capabilities and user design. However, there were definitely still flaws in the UI — for one, it wasn’t very self-intuitive to navigate to your own profile on Spotify, as there is no profile tab on the app. In addition, there were some small features that some other apps did better. Soundcloud, for example, made the process of sharing a playlist much more easy and obvious on the user than Spotify did. This led us to the next phase of our design process…

In order to shed more light on the differences between apps, we decided we needed to watch users going through the same process on two different apps, and compare the good versus the bad. We came up with several different scenarios:

This phase essentially gave us a clearer idea of what each app did better specifically, and helped us gather together some of the key features of each and combine them in our own prototype. For instance, Spotify makes adding songs to playlists more streamlined by giving the option to add an entire music album to it, whereas Soundcloud fails to offer this feature.

To add on to this competitive analysis, we narrowed down our list of apps to the three most used by our users: Spotify, Soundcloud, and Google Play. We then created hierarchical sitemaps for these apps to identify their web structure and core elements, as well as comparing the genre lists each one had available to see if there were any major discrepancies in that department.

In the end, we decided to base our prototype mainly off of Spotify’s UI, with small tweaks to it based off our research studying our users and other apps. Some of the key changes we included are as follows:

Ultimately, the goal of the project wasn’t to create a fully functional prototype, but rather to identify features with flaws and redesign them. Thus, we used Invision to create just the main screens of our app that included our redesigned features on them.

In the end, I would say we managed to fulfill the project requirements satisfactorily. Our redesign of the prototype addressed several design flaws in Spotify’s user interface, and managed to create solutions to those flaws. I think an actual high fidelity prototype would be an interesting opportunity to pursue in the future because our final product definitely has it merits in improving preexisting music applications.

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