Shazam Update (Conceptual Project)
This was a conceptual project completed as part of the General Assembly User Experience Design Immersive program.
3 Weeks to complete.
My Role: Documentation Lead
Research documentation
User Research
User Flows
Research synthesis
Presentation
Project Goal
"Increase the amount of time a user spends in the Shazam app by creating new and unique ways to connect users to their music."
Discover Phase
We began our investigation by evaluating the capabilities of the app, what frustrations it might cause users, and where things didn't work well, or just didn't exist.
The top absent features that we identified were:
Shazam currently only creates one playlist from a user's entire history of Shazams and does not allow for customization or organization.
When connecting to a streaming platform a user is required to complete multiple steps.
We found that users are only able to share a single song at a time and are unable to share multiple songs or an artist.
These inefficiencies could potentially impact the user’s satisfaction.
As our team continued to evaluate Shazam, we reviewed other music apps to discover what they offered differently from Shazam. No service we found was exactly like Shazam. However, most music apps offer music discovery options, sharing options, and extensive playlist management.
To conduct a competitive analysis our team identified 4 competitors:
Apple Music
Spotify
YouTube Music
iHeartRadio.
To further our understanding of potential app capabilities and features our team identified 4 comparators:
Facebook Memories
Google Photos
Pinterest
Instagram
All of the competitors we looked at have mobile apps. For the Task Analysis, each member of our team evaluated the steps a user would take to find a new song, save it to their playlist and share it with their friends in each app.
What competitors are doing well and what Shazam does well
Through the conduction of a Feature Inventory and a Pluses and Deltas analysis, we were able to have a side-by-side comparison of Shazam and the competitors and comparators. We identified that all 4 competitors have options to share and customize a playlist. Shazam is the only one which does NOT have these options. We found all competitors allow users to curate their music selections and would recommend new songs. Additionally, 3 out of 4 competitors also allow interaction with other users, but Shazam does not. We found that enhanced sharing functionality was common among all other apps
Our team would use these findings towards identifying new opportunities for Shazam.
User Interviews
We developed a series of questions and conducted 12 user interviews altogether.
Our goal was to ask open-ended questions so that we could get a deeper understanding of our user’s needs, wants, frustrations, and pain points.
Noteworthy Quotes From Our Research
“It feels like I can relate to the people who listen to the same music as me.”
“I used to spend a lot of time organizing music, but it’s too time-consuming.”
“I share the music that I like with my friends and family to let them know I am thinking about them.”
Define Phase
Affinity Mapping
Our team worked to categorize and sub-categorize the findings into similarities which in turn helped us identify and focus on some of the bigger issues.
We created “I” statements to help us represent each grouping.
The I statements we focused on centered around the organization of their music and connecting with others; such as:
“I view music as my inspiration and a way to connect with others.”
“I don’t want to spend a lot of time organizing my playlist.”
Primary Persona
Secondary Persona
Journey Map
Along her journey, Amanda hears an interesting new song and uses Shazam to identify it.
However, she gets frustrated when trying to sort the song in Shazam and has to switch to Apple Music
After teaching her dance class a group of students ask her to share the playlist.
The inability to share with non-Apple Music users causes another major pain point leaving Amanda feeling disappointed.
Problem Statement
Amanda, a private dance instructor, needs an efficient way to sort a song she just discovered because she wants to curate and share new music with her students to keep her classes interesting.
Design Phase
How Might We Statements
The "how might we" statements we brainstormed helped us explore several possible avenues for solutions. Ultimately our “how might we” statements helped us focus on two features to improve on:
How might we let users access their playlists on other platforms and allow them to customize their playlists through Shazam?
How might we make Shazam more interactive and bring more fun rather than just song recognition?
User Flow
With our personas in mind along with our focus on the selected “how might we” statements, I created the initial user flows. The team collectively worked to refine the user flows even further and we felt it was important to separate our user flow to represent the two features we were focusing on.
For our first user flow, we knew the user wanted to identify a song and that they wanted to easily save the song into appropriate playlists. We took that information and were able to develop the right path to help them reach their goal.
The second user flow is for sharing music with others. We took into consideration the many variables of user preferences such as choosing the number of songs shared and the number of people they share it with.
Wireframes
After completing wire flow sketches we had the information needed to begin working on digital wireframes. Our wireframes helped us visualize the user flow and to discover what might be needed at each step as far as interactivity and functionality. Wireframes were an essential step in exploring the necessary functionality to meet our user's needs.
Delivery Phase
Mid-Fidelity Prototype
Because Shazam is an Apple product, our team followed Apple's Human Interaction Guidelines along with what we could find in Shazam’s Design Guidelines to inform our design decisions moving forward toward completion.
We wanted to create something that could easily live in the Apple app ecosystem.
Improved Connected Playlists
Problem: Users need a way to sort their music by creating or customizing playlists directly in the Shazam app.
Proposed Solution: We propose increasing the connectivity between Apple Music/Spotify and Shazam.
How it would work: Our feature would allow users to sync their current playlist names from their streaming platforms into their Shazam app so they can add a new song directly to their existing playlists.
Benefits: Users would spend more time on the Shazam app to organize their music with this improved connectivity.
Sharing Songs and Playlists
Problem: Users need a way to easily share multiple songs with another user and/or a group of people directly in Shazam.
Proposed Solution: We propose that a user should be able to select multiple songs to share at once or share an entire playlist with both a specific individual and/or a group of users.
How it works: Shazam will act as the bridge for Apple Music and Spotify listeners, allowing its users to share songs and playlists within Shazam for their recipients to access on their respective streaming platforms.
Benefits: Users would spend more time on the Shazam app to connect with other users.
Usability Tests
Our tests were designed to measure if users were successful, whether or not it met user expectations, and what types of errors occurred.
Testing proved to be very beneficial and identified aspects of our design that needed improvement.
Findings
Users had to click multiple times to successfully select radio buttons
3 of 4 users tried to click on the Added to Playlist section as a button
2 of 4 users paused and required prompting to navigate to the Community Page
3 of 4 users required multiple attempts to complete the “Edit Playlist” function in the kebab menu
Users reported design was text-heavy
Actions Taken
Increased the touch target to make it easier to click
Created a button and removed the Save link
Swapped globe icon to multiple user icon
Added pencil edit icon near the playlist title
Redesigned visual elements of the Community Page
Prototype
Thank you for taking the time to review this case study. To see the prototype in action, click below. Please note that the functionality is limited.
Conclusions
Business Model Alignment
The Shazam solution that we produced was based on the project goal: Increase the amount of time a user spends in the Shazam app by creating new and unique ways to connect users to their music.
Customers of Shazam engage with the unique “Audio Fingerprint” search engine which then refers users to a music service, such as Apple Music, to purchase or stream the music they find.
The service that Shazam provides refers consumers to other business products outside of the Shazam app. Increasing the time a user spends on the Shazam app increases the potential revenue generation through sales channels. This is especially true when users engage with those who are not using Shazam in order to share playlists and songs between platforms.
What Was Learned
We discovered that Shazam has limited capabilities and currently acts as just a song recognition and search engine app. We identified through user interviews that users want more capabilities and interactions with others when engaging with their music.
We made use of our research and created two solutions:
Improved Connectivity to Streaming Platforms
Sharing Songs & Playlists through an online Shazam Community
Our usability tests showed that the benefits of our solution included increased user engagement and time spent on the app.