Music Secretary: Future of Listening to Music Experience

Project Overview

Music Secretary is a product with artificial intelligence that generates music playlists for you based on your moods, activities, and your favorite genres and artists through conversational interaction to provide convenience, more personalized services, and emotional connection to the service itself.

My role

As a UX Designer, I performed user interviews, affinity mapping, prototyping, and usability testing.

Timeframe

3 Days

Limitations, Parameters, Resources, and Materials

Used Marvel apps to create interactive prototypes with rapid sketches on papers.

Initial Problem Statement

Living in the culture of abundance of contents, users have difficulty with selecting songs that matches to their preferences.

How did you confirm or refine your initial assumptions?

Conducted 6 user interviews who listens to music almost everyday using music streaming services to learn about users’ behaviors and needs. Based on my key insights, I have refined my initial assumption.

Living in the fast music-consuming culture that are enabled by music streaming services, its hard to form an emotional connection to the music playlists and the products itself.

How can we design a service that provides more personalized experiences, emotional connections, and sense of ownership that is easy to use?

User Interviews

In total of 6 Interviews.

“I choose a playlist from Spotify based on my moods, genres, and artists that I like.”

“I rarely go back to the songs I listened to, unless certain songs that I am really obsessed about.”

“I don’t remember about the titles and artists of the songs in the playlist because I use music for the background sound to enhance my moods and concentration for certain activity.”

User Interview Notes

Important Insights

1. Music streaming service users are passive about their music selection, and only areas they want to control are genres, artists, and moods.
2. People use music for their mood enhancement and productivity for their daily indoor and outdoor activities.
3. People are satisfied with their current fast music-consuming behaviors however, wants to feel ownership of certain songs that they are obsessed about.

Sketches

1. On-boarding

Music Secretary introduces herself, explains basic functions of the product. User can tab mic button to start conversation with the secretary.

2. Mood Input

Secretary asks users about their mood today by providing options for the moods.

3. Musical Preferences

Users are asked to select their favorite genres and artists which does not change often.

4. Music Playlist

Based on users’ mood, weather, current activity, and location, Music Secretary generates streaming playlist that are suitable for users’ preferences.

5. My Playlist

By liking a certain songs, those songs are saved to my playlist. User can sort them in different ways, and be able to export their playlists to other music platforms to purchase songs.

This unique function enables user to have an ownership to their favorite list of songs.

5. Conversation with Music Secretary

By tabbing mic button on the top navigation bar, user can start conversation with Music Secretary. User can ask any questions they have about the product, songs, and ask to perform tasks for them.

Usability Tests and Resulting Iterations

Tasks

1. Can you successfully input all the information required without hassel.

2. Understands the main function of this app.

3. Be able to change your playlists by inputting different moods, and activities.

4. How to start conversation with music secretary, and can utilize this feature.

Test Results

1. 2 out of 3 participants had hard time going to my playlists.
2. 2out of 3 participants didn’t know how to start conversation with secretary.

Problems

1. Placements of UI elements are confusing
2. Not taking a full advantage of the conversational aspect of the product.
3. Hierarchy of information.

Prototype

Live Prototype: https://marvelapp.com/221i97i

Reflection

It surprised me how the music-listening culture is changing so rapidly, that user wants more faster and instant but personalized services. Even though, a lot of existing music-streaming services are providing convenience for user to give lists of playlists user can choose from, and give recommendations based on their history, it is hard to form a emotional connection to the pre-generated music playlists, and the services itself which users are craving for.

If music is used for mood enhancement, can the music service itself provide that emotional understanding for the user?