springboard bootcamp plisten

Overview

Team

Me [End-to-end product designer]
Lea Skrinjar [Mentor and senior designer]

Duration

6 weeks

Background

Streaming music shapes industry; playlist is the magic

Streaming shapes today's music industry, contributing over 80% to U.S. revenue, says RIAA. GenZ, pivotal in this trend, makes up 60% of streaming consumers according to Spotify. They crave new tunes for brain stimulation, emotional expression, and connection. Therefore, what GenZ needs is a platform that merges music discovery with self-expression – and that's the magic of music playlists.

Key features

Plisten comes in, where you can:

Feature #1

Effortless and customized onboarding to create your unique music profile

Feature #2

Seamlessly craft playlists by Mood, Artist, Genre, or Activity

Feature #3

Pen your music diary, express yourself to connect with music that define you

Feature #4

Explore and remix your tunes with others’ playlist for a collaborative musical adventure

The opportunity - understand target market

GenZ speaks loud in streaming world, but their needs are not satisfied yet

In today's music market, streaming music has a significant share, and the majority of its users are from GenZ. Through desk research, insights were gained into their listening habits and motivations.

They search for

Enjoyment, happiness and normality since the pandemic
Not getting bored (after all, music stimulates the whole brain)

Special emotion and DIY wellness menu
Social/Interpersonal bonding

The current frustrations - competitors research

The current playlist experience requires users to manually add songs one by one, which is very time-consuming; even when finding playlists through search keywords, the quality of the songs inside is often unsatisfactory.

Spotify, Apple Music, and Netease Cloud Music, were chosen as competitors because they are among the most popular music streaming services in the world. Spotify utilizes algorithms to recommend personalized playlists to users, and users can also create their own playlists with a high level of personalization. Apple Music offers a vast library of 90 million songs, 30,000 playlists, spatial audio, immersive sound, lyrics view, and live radio stations playing various genres. Netease Cloud Music has over 108 million monthly active users and offers social functions such as song comments and personalized playlists like Personal FM.

User interview

Screened out 10 music lovers to listen to their playlists, their pain points and needs

Key findings

Crafting a playlist is challenging, and pre-made playlists lack personalization

All interviewees believe that creating playlists is too time-consuming, requiring them to add songs one by one. A single playlist often fails to cater to multiple listening scenarios; they listen to music during road trips, at the gym, and their music preference varies with their mood. While it's undeniable that finding a pre-made playlist saves time, the quality of songs in these playlists is not guaranteed and sometimes lacks the element of surprise.

Music you listen to define and reflect who you are

Music lovers seek and define themselves in the playlists they listen to. Sometimes they want to show off their taste, and at other times, they invest their emotions in the songs. They aim to express themselves through a playlist and hope to record their moods in their listening history.

Sharing is caring

8/10 interviewees wish to socialize through music and playlists. They search for what songs their friends and key opinion leaders (KOLs) are currently listening to and are keen to understand the thought process behind others' playlist creation.

Other frustration

A minority of interviewees find discovering new songs challenging. The quality of music varies across platforms, with some offering poor sound quality and lacking sufficient music copyrights. These are identified as side or technical pain points, which are not major problem we will solve through Plisten.

#1 Design goal and ideation

Three keywords to generate or discover a playlist: personalization, customization, and easy-to-make

Brainstorming table. Ideas with thumbs up are selected to further design

Regarding personalization, we initially considered creating a unique avatar for each user. However, this approach might make the entire product overly gamified. Therefore, we decided to craft this "persona" based on the user's listening history and habits, essentially through "recommendations."

As for customization, we want users to have extensive control over setting up a playlist, including changing the cover, track order, name, etc. We even thought about allowing changes in font, font size, and color, but these features aren't directly connected to the playlist. Instead, allowing users to choose a song as the playlist cover might be more relevant and could tie into future diary features. Also, users can always tag a song or a playlist.

Regarding ease of creation, our primary goal is to help users establish the habit of creating playlists. For example, asking in the morning if they want to create a morning playlist, but this approach might restrict users, leading to annoyance or resistance. Therefore, we give start to create right back to users.

#2 Design goal and ideation

Provide a place for music lovers to express themselves

Expressing oneself can be an immediate outpouring of emotions or a reflection after a period of time. For the immediate expression, we considered providing users with a mood bar that appears periodically. However, frequent notifications might feel burdensome to users, so we decided to let users spontaneously record their mood. They can do this through a song, an entire playlist, or even find keywords recorded by the system in their listening history.

#3 Design goal and ideation

Provide a platform for music lovers to share and communicate playlist. More importantly, empower them to emerge other's music adventuress

We considered creating an all-in-one powerful social platform, but this does not align with users' social media habits. Rather than sharing on the music platform itself, they prefer to share their feelings and tastes on other social media platforms. Of course, we will provide basic posting and commenting features. However, this does not strongly link to the concept of 'playlist'. Therefore, we came up with the highlight feature of allowing users to remix their own playlists.

Design - Wireflows

Based on concept sketches, four core wireflows have been designed for testing.

Design - 2 rounds of usability testings

Conducted 20 user testings to collect initial impressions of specific screens and uncover uasbility problems in our wireframs

Onboarding: music preference setting
Create a happy playlist
Write a music journal and share
Find and remix a playlist in square