Product Perusals: Content Discovery
A product critique (ft. Soundcloud and IKEA)
If you’re wondering how I came to the conclusion to write about Soundcloud and IKEA, don’t think too hard — they just happened to be two most recent product experiences from the past two weeks.
As part of my resolution to write more often, I want to take more time to reflect on products and product experiences that I find interesting. My hope is that sharing and articulating these thoughts gives me a stronger sense of product and a better understanding of the people that use and experience these products. This post (and hopefully more like it) is partly inspired by Julie Zhou’s loose guidelines on product critiques. I’m adding my own penchant of taking unrelated topics out of context to highlight ways that they are both similar and different. My hope is that juxtaposing different products and experiences will encourage a deeper and more multifaceted understanding of the implicit motivations and explicit reactions behind them.
Soundcloud: First Impressions
I first heard about Soundcloud (SC) through some of my musically-inclined friends that would pass along links to remixes, flips, and covers that couldn’t be found anywhere else. My first impressions of the app is that it mainly catered to creative producers/DJ-types that were leveraging SC as a distribution medium and a social media platform. Thinking back to my first use of the app, two features stuck out to me:
- SC overlaid audio amplitude over the audio file which helped users quickly find and seek to specific parts of a track. Unique interactions with this layered interface (dubbed “waveforms”) turned audio scrubbing into a delightful gesture and less of a guess-and-check mystery.
2. On the desktop, SC layered user-generated comments and feedback to provide real-time visual annotations on top of an audio experience. This was a novel concept to the typical music enthusiast who might look up lyrics, but never consider real-time comments — moreover, these comments offered, for the first time, a medium to annotate and articulate reaction to the musical features of a piece.
Despite these interesting features, I wasn’t convinced that SC could retain me as a regular user when the majority of my music library and interests were represented on more popular platforms like Spotify and Pandora. The biggest drawback for me was the hit-or-miss nature of searching for the next track. Without curated playlists like Spotify and the granularity of Pandora in characterizing a track, finding the “next thing” to listen to on SC was frustrating and didn’t seem all that personable.
It seems like Soundcloud was always meant for more of a sophisticated/serious user base that knew who they were looking for since each song seems to be capped with a maximum of one tag. With common tags like #edm and #rap seemed dominated by re-uploads of mainstream songs, aspiring artists seemed to start tagging their tracks with their own namesake in order to help their fans find them easier.
For me, and perhaps other listeners new to the platform, this ultimately formed the drop-off point between <20 minutes of aimless browsing and a potentially longer and richer experience.
Note: Soundcloud did launch a recommendation engine in July 2016 that is overshadowed by its existing “Stream” feature which just plays music from followed artists or your current tag. The quickest route to the feature seems to be a circuitous path back to “Home” and then to its “Discover” tab. Upon reaching the feature, I find a disjointed feed of 10-track segments based on each of my individual likes rather than a cohesive thread of songs based on my listening history.
Soundcloud: Lurkers and Curators
As I spent more time on the platform discovering hidden artists, I realized that I began to settle into an unexpected archetype outside of the numerous producers/musicians that for lack of a better name, I’ll name “creators”. I became a Soundcloud “lurker”.
Though I wasn’t actively contributing to the SC community, I felt compelled to create an account for the sole purpose of bookmarking songs I liked that I worried I wouldn’t find again. These tendencies eventually evolved into a subset of lurker attributes when I began to curate songs to form playlists. I would then subtly share these songs with friends by playing them inconspicuously in the background. Validation from friends remarking, “this track sounds dope, who is this?”, sparked the off-hand, “Oh this? It’s off this Soundcloud artist I found the other day”.
There was a smug sense of explorer’s pride that characterized the tracks that I stumbled upon using Soundcloud. Like me, I felt like creators and lurkers alike on the platform had this implicit desire to preserve the natural and unfiltered content that was proudly theirs.
Soundcloud: a year from now
In response to Julie Zhou’s prompt:
Based on all that you know, how successful do you think the app will be a year from now?
The biggest asset that SC has is in their original content. It creates a two-sided marketplace for both artists and listeners. SC offers a freemium model on both sides and allows artists to monetize on their content through ads on their highest premium tier. However, I worry about SC’s ability to monetize on the listeners’ side. I rarely encountered ads during the weeks that I used SC which suggests a downturn in ad sales, an indication that SC’s premium subscriptions (Soundcloud Go) might also be low. Without the ads volume to drive revenue on both sides of the market, SC’s business model might be in jeopardy. Though I don’t much context on how music-streaming services work in relation to record deals and publishing rights, I suspect that SC will likely be acquired by another streaming service at some point in the next year.
IKEA is in many ways another form of content discovery. However, rather than Soundcloud’s independent artists and musicians, IKEA offers a platform for their in-house designers to connect with furniture shoppers. Rather than discussing the company and design of their products at large, I want to focus on my experiences, impressions, and observations as a first-time shopper at IKEA.
As a recent college grad who had always had the fortune of living in pre-furnished places, I entered the store with memories of watching Land Before Time in IKEA’s Småland while my parents would shop for new furniture. Already, I was walking in with positive recollections of eating Swedish meatballs with the family in the food court and ice cream cones on the car ride home.
Looking back on my first IKEA shopping experience, I wanted to highlight two things that felt different from any other shopping or journey for discovering content:
- There was a delightful levity from the whole showroom experience. I had no need for a shopping cart or any analogous feeling of trying articles on in the dressing room. Everything was directly presented in front of me for consider, and I needed to only to look across the aisle to compare two similar pieces of furniture.
- I eventually decided on grabbing a hard shopping list after deciding that taking photos of both the tags and furniture proved to be too unwieldy. Rather than coming into the store with a list of things to buy, I found myself dynamically re-evaluating and re-designing the space I would be moving into based on the experiences and impressions that I had while in various showrooms.
IKEA impressed me with a thoughtful store layout that more or less gave me a physical representation of their actual catalog. However, the design of the layout implicitly imposing longer routes for me through the store despite the “shortcuts” I took to get to my desired locations (i.e. work spaces and living rooms). This actually led me to add an unexpected item to my list — a portable laptop desk that I found on en route to the work spaces section.
Though I entered IKEA with a working mental image of what to buy, passing by carefully arranged rooms brought new ideas to the peripheries of broadening vision I had of my future room.
Yet, the true genius in my opinion of IKEA is capitalizing on the furniture expedition as a half-day and somewhat tiring experience. The carefully placed Food Market and Bistro at the end of the showroom and the check-out counter respectively offer a tantalizing capstone to the entire shopping experience. I think back to my young parents rewarding the patience of 8-year-old me and my little brother with ice cream and Swedish meatballs, and wouldn’t be surprised if over 80% of families converted to buy some form of food. Upon first thought, it seems ridiculous to picture a food court and a furniture store existing in the very same building, let alone part of the very same store. But if the presence of IKEA’s very own baby-sitting playground is any indication, it’s clear that IKEA intentionally sought to remove the stresses of furniture shopping to create a more wholesome and holistic experience for everyone involved.
IKEA: a year from now
IKEA is a 74-year-old enterprise and I can’t imagine the company stopping short before its 75th anniversary. I do believe that we may begin to see changes in its shopping experience that might follow trends of a growing on-demand economy. It’s exciting to see that IKEA is already exploring VR as a new way to experience furniture, but I believe that the existing mobile shopping experience leaves a lot to be desired and I would expect them to hold the app to the same standards as the rest of IKEA experience and concept.
What Soundcloud can learn from IKEA
If you’re still with me so far, let’s start drawing some new ideas from putting IKEA and Soundcloud side by side.
I think the largest lesson Soundcloud can takeaway from the IKEA experience is one of cohesion and arrangement. Part of the magic of the IKEA experience is realizing how individual pieces of furniture fit into a mental image of a larger space through immersive experience. In comparison, the journey to find the next track to listen to was a complicated combination of looking through related artists, clicking on their tracks (instead of their feed) and then mentally comparing/sifting through tracks that had more plays/likes. The time spent to find the next track was inversely correlated with the time I gave to assess its worth.
Soundcloud doesn’t have to mimic Spotify’s curated playlists to create this sort of cohesion. Instead, it could add layers onto its machine-learning platform to better track virality across popular tags and follow trends across an individual’s personal history. Better yet, I wonder if Soundcloud could engender authentic collaborations between artists that build on each others’ creations through shared playlists or cosponsored tags. I imagine listeners would be much more open to related artists endorsed by the artists they follow over a hit-or-miss suggestion algorithm.
What IKEA can learn from Soundcloud
One of the most interesting elements of the Soundcloud experience is its waveform concept that provides not only an atheistic but also a practical layer. IKEA lost a portion of this atheistic appeal by forcing me to remember the elegant furniture piece in front of me as an obscure Swedish word and two numbers. There was a practical element lost as well when I forgot which unfamiliar Swedish word corresponded to the heavier of my two furniture items (order mattered somewhat because I wanted to minimize energy lifting heavy boxes).
There’s some basic cross-listing that IKEA can do here to integrate a mobile layer to its shopping experience. Rather than a static mobile rendition of its catalog, the existing IKEA app should aspire to be yet another seamless feature of the IKEA experience. It could be as simple as a dynamic (think Google Instant) search bar that helps you build your shopping list, or as sophisticated as an augmented reality experience* that lets you archive furniture pieces and then re-imagine them in a room that you design.
I should note that IKEA was relatively early in integrating the concept of augmented reality to visualizing furniture. However, IKEA leapfrogged an important step of first perfecting how the mobile layer can augment the existing IKEA experience. I believe that AR isn’t quite at the stage yet where consumers feel comfortable buying an item simply projected in AR, let alone furniture products that tend to come with larger price tags. Commercialization of more immersive VR experience might change this, but we’re still a few years away from having Oculus and Hololens devices readily accessible.
Soundcloud also brings the artist and creator of content more into the fold than IKEA does. I found myself wondering if the designer behind my desk happened to design a chair or light fixture to accompany it as well. Soundcloud’s annotations also help color and characterize the unique tracks on its platform. IKEA’s room arrangements might have also been more interesting with some commentary from interior designers. I’m no designer myself, but I would be fascinated to hear whether certain arrangements help facilitate more natural light, make the room feel bigger, etc…
Being a relatively new user of both Soundcloud and IKEA offered an interesting opportunity to approach both with fresh eyes. Putting them side by side was an interesting exercise, but I wonder if there are similar findings that can be drawn from different products and experiences that don’t share a common thread like “content discovery”.
Give me a ♡ below if you read something interesting or a comment if there’s other product/experience combinations you’d be interested in!
