Overview
Industry
Music Tech
Project
New Discovery Feature
Team
Monica Cooke
Genevieve Smith
Martin Robertson
My Role
UX/UI Designer and Researcher
Timeline
2.5 week design sprint
Visit
Challenge
To help users explore music beyond their current circle, the client wants to add a Discovery feature to the app, allowing users to search for, follow, and receive music recommendations based on their interests.
The design should provide a valuable, connected experience without relying on metrics and gamification like other social networking apps.
Outcome
Our solution allows users to naturally tag and share musical ideas on a news feed, while also connecting them with potential collaborators through second-degree connections.
The discovery section enables global searches, helps users connect with new artists, and find public and venue-based jams, enhancing community engagement both digitally and physically.
Competitor Analysis
How does Discovery in Social Media, Streaming Apps and Music Making Platforms work?
Highlight popular and trending content and music based on user interest, location and accounts followed
Analyse user behaviour and surface similar music, posts, accounts, tags
Spotify 'Radio' feature creates continuous playback of songs from a seed song or artist
Users can browse by genre, instrument, specific artists/tracks
Feed curated playlists by industry experts
'Follow' other creators
User Research Insights
53 Responses to our screener survey and 14 Interviews with music creators
Music is discovered by friends recommendations or going 'down the rabbit hole' of "you might like this"
Musicians will expand their music discovery journey by looking where their mentors/musicians they like get their inspiration from
Search and Filter by artist name/song is not sufficient and is found lacking as people are more interested in looking for things like genra, mood tags, artist bios
There's a lot of music available across different platforms and genres out there and users find it difficult to curate it
Client Design Lab
Myself, Gen and Martin met Tim and Noel (Endlesss) at their base in Music Hackspace, Somerset House for a half day ideation lab where we fleshed out their vision for the app and spoke about connecting physical and digital spaces through music. They clearly felt a responsibility to protect artists mental health and we made that a central focus of what we will be designing for.
Early sketches
Out initial ideas included a newsfeed, organic tags, global search bar and curated recommendations as well as the ability to follow, connect and join virtual bands.
Prototypes
We leaned into connecting physical spaces with digital ones and designed a few screens on how that might look. We imagined being able to visit the techno scene in London by venue hopping virtually.
We needed to dig deeper.
© Monica Cooke, 2024