About Client
Amazon had been in the music business for more than 20 years (CDs were the second item sold on Amazon, after books). Amazon Music launched Music streaming in 2014, initially as a benefit just for Prime members.
Since then, it has expanded into a full streaming service, offering a variety of tiers, content and plans to customers in more than 40 countries around the world.
Project Overview
The Product Design Student Challenge is a multi-week design sprint that focuses on exploring the future of Amazon Music.
Over the course of several weeks, 20 teams of 2-4 students worked towards reimagining the future of music as we participated in an end to end design sprint centering around Amazon's music streaming service.
3 Weeks | Spring 2023
Amazon Music
Design Sprint Challenge
Hailee Hoa Luong | Jen Lee | Nishi Chitale
We learned
People have different music personalities based on their moods and activities
However
The current application does not cater to this need
Therefore
We introduced “Listening mode” feature that allow users to create different listening modes to sort their own music content from Library at ease
See Final Prototype
Analyzed the following metrics: number of sessions, page views, sequence of pages visited
Time Frame: 1 January 2022 - 5 October 2022
Analyzed real-time recordings, website page clicks, mouse movements, and scrolling patterns.
Time Frame: Last 30 days
We used Google Optimize to create our A/B Testing variations. It allows running some experiments that are aimed to help increase visitor conversion rates and overall visitor satisfaction.
The time frame is short to provide quantity and quality data for the website.
Hotjar could not track the Map and Zip Code Calendar, making it difficult to understand how users use and interact with them.
Passively plays music
User Problem
Users feel overwhelmed by the amount of content available on music apps. At the same time, they prefer listening to music of their choice as they go about their daily activities or moods.
However, music often gets mixed up and it becomes a hassle to manually select songs or playlists to customize their experience.
How might we...
Help people have better control on tailoring their music experiences based on their mood and situation?
Solution
Allow users to create different listening modes to sort their own music content from Library at ease
Once we had a clear definition of our problem statement and our solution, we proceeded to create a detailed user journey map to outline the different steps of creating the mode and listening to music within the mode. We also made mid-fidelity wireframes which we took to the users for testing.
Through user testing, we understood that participants were confused by unit on the music tempo slider, they found the words: “very slow/very fast” highly subjective.
Allow users to hear music sample
We took the feedback and changed the unit to beat per minute, and added a preview button which allows users to hear a music sample for each selected tempo.
In the beginning, we allowed users to customize their music mode image background.
Removal of visual theme step
We took the feedback and changed the unit to beat per minute, and added a preview button which allows users to hear a music sample for each selected tempo.
In testing, participants complained that leaving the mode would require three taps.
Simplify exiting the mode
We eliminated both the drop-down menu and the exit confirmation screen and replaced them with the mode icon with a cross.
Not only were the participants not satisfied with the hierarchy of the mode screen but were also expecting to see a list of songs upfront.
Move what is important to the top of the screen
Our solution was to move their top 5 songs to the top of the screen so they could easily access them.
The final stage of our design sprint was presenting our ideas to an audience of 150+ Amazon employees, including Byron Merritt, Amazon Music's VP of Design and Creative.
Ultimately, we received positive feedback from them and got some great feedback on how to improve our designs.
