This project was completed under Product Space, a product organization at UCLA that empowers students with educational resources on product management, marketing, and design as well as mentorship under a year-long fellowship. Our fellowship culminated in a capstone project where we had to create a business idea.
When brainstorming different ideas for our project, we, as avid music listeners and fanatic Spotify users, all happened to share a similar frustration: it’s difficult to share music with friends that are subscribed to different music streaming platforms, a notable one being Apple Music. We took a step back and thought about how platform incompatibility might affect the experience of music in a social context. We then sought to build something that could act as a center for users across different platforms in order to make music a more connected social experience.
Thus, this is where our idea of cheep hatched from.
We then took a look into 3 other music-social platforms to analyze what features they offered in order to determine our own features and how we could differentiate ourselves from them.
Now that we knew exactly the audience we intended to target, we conducted ten 30-minute user interviews in order to better understand our users’ music listening and discovery habits as well as their experiences with music within a social context. Our interview consisted of 4 parts: general music habits and behavior, primary music streaming platform specific questions, social experiences with music, and the power of mutuals. We recruited college students that all had different relationships with music, from casual music listeners to small artists who made their own music. Here were 4 key takeaways:
Here were some key insights we found:
For users whose social circle doesn’t share the same music streaming platform, music is less of a social experience.
People take pride in finding new niche, up-and-coming artists and love recommending them to others.
Users are generally open to sharing their music and see it as a way of fostering connections. When giving song recommendations, users value feedback from the recipients.
From our user research, we came up with three different user groups that reflected 3 different types of users we intended for cheep to reach. We then created user personas based off of each respective group.
How might we create a centralized platform that connects users from different music streaming platforms so that they can have a more social music-listening experience?
An app bridging users subscribed to different streaming services, where they can interact and share music with each other
Upon completing our preliminary research, we then began ideating. We compiled a list of features from our competitive analysis, features mentioned in user interviews, and also our own ideas we brainstormed based off of common user frustrations and goals. Then, we chose our most important ones based on a feature prioritization matrix. We wanted to prioritize based off of our goals of cross-platform integration, social, and music discovery.
Based off of these features, I then created a site map that encapsulated all of the flows of the app. The organization of this information then guided me as I created initial sketches and low-fidelity wireframes.
As one of the core aspects of cheep, cross-platform integration allows users from any music-streaming platform to use our appllication. Addressing one of our main issues of being connecting with others from different platforms, I brainstormed features that users would typically use with their friends.
This feature parallels Spotify’s Listening Activity feature, which a lot of Spotify users expressed enthusiasm in using because it allowed them to get an idea of their friends’ music taste and moods.
Users expressed frustration in not being able to create joint playlists with friends on different platforms. Here, they can create collaborative playlists with friends, as well as add songs from different streaming platforms.
Users can recommend songs to their friends and get validated on their recommendations. In interviews, people expressed frustration when recommendations didn't seem to evoke a response from their friends, and satisfaction when their friends voiced a positive reaction.
In addition to connecting with their current social circles, users can make new music-based connections based on close proximity and music compatibility scores.
When looking at another user's profile, users will be able to not only get an overview of their music taste but also music they share in common.
Integrate information from your music streaming platform
See what your friends are listening to
Create playlists with friends and add songs from any service.
Find users with similar music taste, sorted by location and music compatibility.
Send song recommendations and get feedback.
We tested the high fidelity version of the designs and having passed our success metrics, were thus able to then validate them.
of testers want this app to exist and would recommend to their friends
average task success rate, with minimal to no error
of interviewees believed they would feel more connected to their friends
Next Steps
In order to track the app’s success, we intend to gauge the following KPIs for several features, prioritized based off of the main goals of our app, per quarter over a year.
These will indicate whether users are engaging with others from different music streaming services. If these KPIs aren’t met, it may imply that users are not using cheep for its cross-platform integration and that we will need to encourage and make these features more clear for our users.
This will inform us if users are successfully making new connections, and this can guide our team in adjusting or adding new features that can help sustain these connections.
These measures give us insight into our users’ experiences with sharing and finding new music and can validate whether users are enjoying their music recommendations from cheep.
This was my first time being the sole designer of a project, and being given creative freedom and working under a short timeline with a small team really challenged me. I got the chance to guide my teammates about the whole process that goes into product design. Here are a few key takeaways I got from this project:
Within the timeline of our project, we spent the most time doing research on industries and target demographics and conducting in depth user interviews. Investing our energy into this early on paid off, because it set the foundation of our app. It not only drove the design process, but also helped validate the need and potential of cheep to thrive in the market.
Not having another designer to collaborate with on this project made me turn to other people in Product. Talking to Engineering made me think about design system maintenance, and getting advice from a Senior Product Designer with design systems experience allowed me to consider exploring how this maintenance would look in practice.