Saavn — from tool to an Experience

Let’s get this out of the way that Saavn really serves useful as a product to me . It delivers as a music tool , it delivers as a reliable streaming service and it definitely delivers on the content front .

Saavn suffers from the ability to Surface recommendations. Amidst the mirage of the KISS design paradigm ,it just fails to surface the Curated content editors are putting out by the day .

Add value to Context too. I have always wanted Music listening to be an experience . I just thought , what good does a simple List serve when content curation is not simply adding context to a bunch of songs , rather adding value to the context too .

So for the past two days i sat around thinking , brainstorming what could be my ideal music streaming experience . Some UX / UI Considerations that make the whole app become all the more engaging for me . So today i present , a Saavn redesign with ‘Collections and Song of the day

Design Philosophy

To begin with I have a music taste, everyone does and i for sure know ‘some’ songs which would be a definite fit for my playlist .

A music streaming service can also be a fantastic music discovery tool

but what’s beyond that ? — a dark void where i am plagued by multiple lists and categories galore. So instead i just stick around to playing my own songs . A music streaming service can also be a fantastic music discovery tool and therefore this concept is based around that simple philosophy.

New and Trending with the Ad-Modal

Won’t deny this, but New and Trending on Saavn is actually pretty useful . I definitely come across some interesting releases via this feature but what keeps my user engagement low is the ‘first glance’ distraction.

Gestalt’s principle explains that a user typically traces the screen elements in a ‘Z’ form

It is completely dominated by the big banner ad pictured above the category. User eye tracking is such a key concept — Gestalt’s principle explains that a user typically traces the screen elements in a ‘Z’ form — first the left top corner and then the right top , coming to bottom left and finally the bottom right

According to my first jump to the app , i almost always miss the new and trending category . It’s only later that i scroll up to find it happily suggesting some good music.

Hence it seemed fitting to infuse the ad modal into the sliding panels to remove ad space from top and focus on the new and trending almost immediately

Introducing Collections

As a music streaming platform , Saavn has app categories and boy does it have many .To the extent that it is almost overwhelming

To solve this problem i sat down and talked to some music aficionados . The consensus we arrived to was that ‘diversification in music listing is important but it doesn’t have to be spread across various channels in the app.

The channels in saavn being

1. Charts and list
2. Moods and Genres
3. Radio Stations

Now Collections is what i am calling a smart aggregation of above three , we do away with separate channelling on the front page , the Nav drawer will still hold the separate channels , accessible to user still in one swipe ,

The front page instead shows a user history based aggregation of all three . The user doesn’t have to know that a ‘Party’ smart list is technically a mood and genre item . The word party and similar mood terms signify the same

Similarly the user just knows UK top 50 is something that might interest him , keeping it under a different umbrella is just going to making lesser interaction plausibilities .

The factors that will play a role along with manual curation
- user history with sub categories — either radio, or lists, or genres
- Partner /Network tracks

Song of the day

I just wonder why no music service does this but i think this adds so much emotional value to opening up an app every day . The concept here is to bring up a featured song every day with some relevant interesting trivia or media about the song.

This plays in favour of Saavn in two ways

1. Self discovery about the music on the platform
2. Building up a diverse music taste — eventually more user retention

Saavn as a product really fares well enough to be adopted , but to really make the users retain activity on the app these simplifications(Collections) and feature introduction (Song of the day ) is definite call .

Hoping the team considers this as a positive critique . Signing off here

Feel free to Contact me at iamsupratim@icloud.com regarding any questions and product design consultation