Music Streaming App
Project Background
Late 2013, I was engaged to redesign the number 1 music streaming app in Singapore, AMPed. The app’s user experience had not changed since 2011. With the entry of new players in the music streaming marketplace, a redesign of the music experience for the end users of AMPed was required to maintain the user base and increase uptake.
My Role
As the Lead UX Architect on the project, I lead the redesign with a user centered approach. I worked closely with our geographically dispered team consisting of a visual designer (Sydney), the product owner (Singapore) and developers (Hong Kong) to deliver the best possible experience to our customers, on time and on budget.
The vision was create a more current, personalized, and social experience within AMPed.
The Process
Industry Research
I held kick off meetings with the project stakeholders to understand their goals and reasons for the redesign.
I benchmarked AMPed against the main competitors, in terms of features, interaction model, design, transitions, usability and social integration.
Market Research
A research program (by the Customer Insights team) had already been undertaken upon my engagement with this project, resulting in 5 customer segments being identified. I narrowed the 5 segments down into 2 key personas/archetypes in order to keep our design focused and relevant.
User Research
I planned and ran research, which tasked 340 users (matching our customer segments) with finding their way through the AMPed 3.0 content tree online.
There was an equal split between AMPed users and non AMPed users (but of other music apps), and the main 16 use cases were covered.
Information Architecture
From research activity and the study of the current IA in comparison to the competitor’s, it was evident that the new IA must be flattened, content groups reorganised, secondary functions placed in menus (to reduce cognitive load), unused labels removed (to eliminate visual clutter) and multiple paths created for music discovery.
This and the fact the UI needed to be flexible enough to handle future enhancements lead me to opting for the hamburger menu (left sliding menu), popularized by Facebook. Having tested the interaction models of another 10 music apps in the market place, the left sliding menu was the easiest to navigate.
However once I needed to communicate concepts with my remote team (product owner and developers), hand drawn sketches created confusion.
Given we already had certain challenges to work around (such as 3 different time zones), we needed a clearer way of communicating early concepts. So low fidelity wireframes were developed, and through many rounds of feedback developed into 209 high fidelity wireframes.
I encouraged the whole project team to get involved with documenting any new use cases they discovered along the way, which made everyone feel involved in the process and screens being developed.
This lead to an avalanche of feedback and discussions from the product team and developers, and really got everyone involved in the design process. The screen flows turned out to be a powerful tool for communicating design requirements to developers, who until this date had been occasionally questioning the wireframes.
The UI designer would then share her creative direction, new style guide and mood boards, mocking up samples of screens to see how the UI would look and feel. This was a good way of testing the style guide in situ to ensure it would work in practice.
The Prototype
Once the ‘Discover’ phase of the project had been designed, a transitional prototype was built by our front end developer, to test both the user experience and visual design.
Both rounds revealed small tweaks that could be made to the transitions and interactions. The side benefit of this research was the product proposition and pricing was improved.
Beta Testing & Release
Once the Beta app was ready, I ran through all scenarios and tested the UI to ensure the experience was consistent with my initial design. As i discovered and shared bugs with the developers, they would release another version of the app overnight, which would go through the same rounds of testing.
The app was released in the Singaporean iTunes App store on schedule (August 2014) and is being incrementally enhanced. So far most of the feedback has been positive. Some users were initially questioning the location of their offline music (after we changed the download model), and this has been addressed through Help pages within the App.
“The previous interface was heavy, glad to see is much clean looking now. App performance is faster as well. Great potential, hope to see more improvement coming ahead” - Hoe Zai
“Lots of good new stuff in there with a nice clean design.” - SingAppore
“Love the new user interface, real sleek” - Radical76
“Really excellent update to the interface” - Collymore19