Goal-Directed Design 🥅
As an avid music listener and producer, I can relate to wanting a music community where you feel a sense of belonging. Through the creation of My Muse, we created a hub where individuals can find people with similar music tastes, quote certain songs, learn more about artists, and find nearby concerts all in one place. Over the course of about three months, we designed My Muse by following the five phases of GDD:
The gap between fans and artists 🕳️
We wanted to get an extensive understanding of My Muse's possible domain, so we researched the social media industry along with the mental benefits of music fandoms and communities. Through the two sources I read, I learned that social media helps connect fans to artists, but a gap still remains between the two that has yet to be addressed.
To better understand the market and our competition, our team researched the most widely used social media applications that emphasize the use of online forums such as: Amino, Musicboard, Reddit, and Genius.
- Explore the reasons behind their popularity.
- Identify the aspects of each application that users like/dislike.
- Find potential weaknesses.
- Decide how our app could stand out.
- Much of My Muse's competition do not promote music discoverability.
- Much of My Muse's competition do not have a structured moderation system.
- Extensive customization and sub-communities are not always an option.
- None of My Muse's competition allow users to fully stream songs.
"I'm always looking for new music." - Darius 🔍
Darius, like many other avid music listeners, are constantly searching for new music and artists to listen to. However, before we actually started the user research process, we understood that it's important to know who exactly we should be interviewing. Thus, we created a persona hypothesis to try to have a clearer idea of who we want to interview.
- We would most likely have one type of user: someone who generally enjoys listening to music. We imagined our product would be tailored toward young adults, although we also ensured that it would be inclusive to people of all ages who listen to music and want to interact with likeminded individuals.
- The primary persona would exhibit behaviors such as sharing music with family and friends and attend in-person music events such as raves and concerts.
To find potential people to interview, we all reached out to friends and acquaintances. While Alan Cooper suggests interviewing 6-10 people, we conducted interviews with five candidates over the course of a week due to time constraints.
Three of the participants were in their local music scene and two of the participants were everyday music listeners. In these interviews, our team asked questions regarding social media, music discovery, online community, and more.
Following each interview, we all gathered together on Zoom to analyze the results, using a method widely known as Affinity Mapping. Each of us took fifteen minutes to individually write down important topics and thoughts brought up by the interviewee. Afterward, we combined all of our notes by categorizing all of the notes into broad groups:
All five interviewees emphasized the importance of music discoverability. All preferred having a structured moderation system to ensure inclusivity and reduce the chances of harassment and cyberbullying. All interviewees liked the idea of customization to make the app feel more personal.
Additionally, most interviewees said that having access to sub-communities would make them feel keener on using the app to engage with likeminded people.
Eat, sleep, breathe music 🎧
Our team organized data from the five interviews and analyzed the answers to help reveal behavioral patterns. Using the affinity maps, notes, and observations we made during our user interviews, we identified whether or not there were behavioral variables at play:
- Importance of music community (high)
- Importance of music discussion (high)
- Importance of music discoverability (high)
Because we only discovered one main pattern, we all agreed that My Muse would have one persona, a primary persona. The primary persona is a representation of all of the interviewees who collectively desired a music community where they could discuss certain songs, artists, and genres while also discovering new music.
Now the fun starts... 🎨
After our team lead sketched ideas for possible screens, we began the wireframing process. I was responsible for wireframing the onboarding process to better visualize the layout of the beginning screens of our app.
Although I attempted to be thorough with wireframing the onboarding process, I completely forgot one of the most important aspects—the option to sign in or sign up. I also realized that certain parts of My Muse require user consent, such as acquiring their location for nearby concerts. To address this, I included a feature where the app first asks to access the user's location which they can either allow or not allow.
Improving consistency & personalization 🛠️
After finishing our first iteration of My Muse, we recruited two of our previous interviewees from the research phase to conduct usability tests on our app in the hopes of finding and addressing any issues. Throughout the test, the participants were asked to follow the Think Aloud Protocol which assisted us in understanding their source(s) of confusion whenever it occurred.
- The home page felt almost lackluster; no immediate way to interact with other users
- The padding and overall spacing of the app were clustered, making it difficult for users to navigate
- The "artist of the week" could be showcased in a more engaging way
Based on our participants' feedback, I went back into Figma and, along with another team member, made a few changes to our home page:
- Added a card showing the music video of an artist along with audio the user can listen to in full
- Made adjustments to the padding and positioning to better adhere to our style guidelines
- Added a follow button along with creating icons for "Artist of the Week"
Home Page - First Iteration
Home Page - Second Iteration
My Muse: a hub for music fans and artists 💿
Based on our market research, user interviews, usability tests, and more, we were able to create My Muse: a hub for music fans and artists. With My Muse, fans and artists alike can discover new music from established and upcoming artists, quote and post lyrics from their favorite songs, and find local music events to cultivate communities both online and in person!
View PrototypeA learning experience of what's to come 📙
- User research is vital; the user research we gathered in the beginning stages of our app's development had a significant impact on our entire design process afterward. If we had more time, I would have wanted to interview a more diverse group of people in regard to age, gender identity, and ethnicity.
- Styles and UI guidelines are essential. Our group followed an 8pt grid and ensured that all of the text and colors used within the app were established before we fully immersed ourselves into Figma. This saved us a lot of time and kept us very organized!
- Usability testing is useful in finding possible issues formed from unconscious biases. If we had more time, I would want us to conduct five interviews rather than two. Moreover, I would have preferred if we conducted our tests in person due to the online tests seeming more rushed and impersonal.
- It's perfectly fine to make mistakes. While designing our app, we became so immersed in the design process that we forgot to consider certain features we originally wanted to add. However, we evenly distributed who would create which additional feature which brought the end product fully together.
- Not everything will go as planned. While attempting to recruit five interviewees for our user research, it was difficult to find any due to scheduling conflicts and last-minute cancellations. However, we were able to adapt to this unfortunate situation and worked with our participants' schedules to secure five interviews.
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