Case study: Designing a new interactive fan tier for the Apple Music App.
To incorporate live-streaming, fan participation, artist rooms and artist support.
A concept project, over a 2-week sprint on a UXDI course with General Assembly, London. Our team was made up of myself, Cat Allen, Charlie Bullman and Izzy Silverman.
My Role:
- We shared most phases of the Double Diamond Design Process — user interviews, competitive/comparative research, affinity mapping, user flows, user journeys, persona, problem statement, sketches and wireframes to the final high-fidelity prototype.
- I project-managed throughout this sprint, using Trello, keeping the group on track for our deadline.
- I also did the final UI edits for our clickable prototype and motivated the team for our multiple design studios.
The Brief and The Business Problem
Following the impact of COVID-19, Apple recognises the importance of continuing to offer awesome music to its members while further supporting the artists.
“Estimates suggest that Apple Music had 72 million subscribers worldwide in June 2020, up by four million from December of the previous year. Apple Music is the second largest music streaming service worldwide, competing with market leader Spotify.” — statista.com
With this in mind, they plan to create a way for artists/musicians to create ‘artist rooms’ on their profile where they can host chats, acoustic gigs, podcasts and interact with their audience. To access these ‘rooms’ you’ll need to support the artist with a small membership, an amount chosen by the artist.
Key features to be included —
- Ability to access a ‘music/artist room’ hub
- Ability to pay for the membership
- Ability to browse and follow artists and get notified when they are live-streaming from their room
- Ability to request to talk or message (both via video and/or via mic) in the music room
- Ability to see the monthly support that the artist gets
- Ability to praise artists with a sort of ‘like/clap’ system
- Ability to save key moments of a ‘music room’ to easily find when an event is finished
- Ability to access ‘music room’ history
- Ability to have breakout rooms with other users
- Ability to message the artist privately and ask questions
The User Problem
Key pain points and our opportunities were — finding poor or irrelevant content and feeling disconnected due to the current lockdown restrictions preventing users from enjoying their favourite live entertainment
45% Increase in Youtube livestreams in the first six months of 2020
53% of livestream viewers say watching livestreams helps them feel connected to something larger than themselves
“Dua Lipa’s Thanksgiving-weekend Studio 2054 livestream was a smashing success: It drew five million viewers — a number that Lipa’s team says is a new record for livestreams.” — Rolling Stone
Discover — let’s really understand the problem
Competitive Analysis
To really understand the direction to take this project we started with competitive analysis, this brought about a near endless list of examples due to the rapid increase in the development of the live streaming sector in recent years — sped up by a global pandemic.
We looked at some of the key players — Facebook Live, Instagram Live, YouTube Live, Dice FM, Spotify and Zoom.
Key aspects we wanted to focus on, were
- How viewers interact on these platforms — from commenting, liking, sharing and saving.
- How they browse, discover and choose content.
- How it works to charge for content.
We discovered that our brief was proposing a platform that sits somewhere in the middle of a music streaming service, an event booking app and a live streaming platform.
Comparative Analysis
Again our options for comparative analysis were endless. We looked at theatres, gyms, festivals, TV streaming services and platforms such as Clubhouse and Twitch — All businesses that have pivoted their offering to cater for remote user access.
This analysis brought into focus more information on how to charge for such services and consider options for donation fees.
It also introduced more ideas on how to increase user interactions in a more novel way, such as using live emojis, multiple rooms and virtual reality.
User Insights
We then carried out 5 user interviews — these interviews brought about some clear insights for us.
“Enjoyment of music comes from the connection to the artist — I want to understand where they’re coming from.”
- Users are most interested in connecting with their favourite artists while accessing a higher more professional level of content due to frustrations of the internet now being saturated with poor live content.
“I’m not fussed about their [artists] personal lives, which we get now anyway.”
- Users weren’t interested in knowing about artists’ personal lives — as that’s readily available on Instagram.
“I like behind the scenes content and seeing how things are made - but I don’t care about the artist’s ‘life’.”
- Instead craving more meaningful content such as — discussions on important cultural topics, and their insights into the art and the music industry.
“I don’t care enough to pay for extra content as there is already so much available and too many subscriptions.”
- Users don’t want to pay extra subscriptions feeling there are now too many of these and it gets hard to keep track even if the price is considered low.
“I don’t care about the other users on the app.”
- Users weren’t interested in interacting with other users on the platform either.
Discover Learnings:
- The biggest learning during this phase was what to do when user research contradicts the brief requirements and how best to tackle this and how to question/communicate this back to the client in a positive manner.
- I also learned how to take on a brief that has endless possibilities in a large and expanding market.
Define — who are we helping?
Primary Persona — Martin ‘The Weekend Warrior’
Martin is a 32 year old TV recruiter living in London.
Usually an avid festival-goer, he is frustrated by the quality of live music experiences available to him during the lockdown period. Martin is looking for a way to feel connected to the artists he likes to support.
Martin has picked up the guitar during lockdown and wants to learn more about his favourite artists’ techniques. He misses the atmosphere of live communal experiences.
Martin needs a better way to interact and engage with his favourite music artists, while accessing live and on-demand content, because his restricted ability to attend real life music events during lockdown has made him feel disconnected.
What are we helping them do? — How Might We…
- make online live music content more appealing?
- make users feel more connected to the artists they follow?
- bring the gig atmosphere home?
- engage users in live streams?
We planned out the flow Martin would take through the current Apple Music App to get to the new pages.
Define Learnings:
- Here I learnt how to translate the persona to others on the team so that everyone could fully understand it and get behind that user persona moving forward.
- Our group had a lot of fun designing for this persona throughout the sprint.
Develop — what did we try?
We started sketching in a design studio, putting all our thoughts down in one-minute sketches. This allowed us to explore potential features in a very low fidelity design. Think creatively about new features and plan the path.
From this, we were able to pull together our main flow and upload it to Marvel for our first round of testing. This brought about some good insights, which helped us really understand the journey Martin would take through the app.
We kept a focus throughout to try and replicate some of the emotions Martin would feel when attending a similar event in real life. Eg: warm-up acts, purchasing merchandise, the build-up of suspense and again the wind-down after a gig.
As Apple Music is a well-established brand we were able to use their current Design System and icons when building our mock-ups, once we were happy with the flow.
Challenges we encountered:
At a couple of points in our sprint journey, we were called to question the brief as certain feature deliverables were contradicted by our research.
Ability to pay for the membership
After lots of discussions, we were able to find working solutions for these features that solved the business problem while meeting the needs and requests of the users.
Users didn’t want to pay an extra subscription on top of the one they already had for Apple Music but were happy to pay a one-off ticket price to access the content for a set period of time eg: 24–48hrs.
Ability to see the monthly support that the artist gets
Taking inspiration from our competitor and comparative research we decided to incorporate an optional donation fee to support artists.
“Why would I donate extra to such a big artist like Dua Lipa?”
This was something that needed refining during testing and iterations as there was some confusion about who the money was going to and who ‘really’ needed that extra income.
We overcame this challenge by making it clear that the donation would be to the supporting artists who were unlikely to be in receipt of the main ticket fee.
What is the afterparty?
Users were confused about where the premium content would be available. Originally behind the scenes features were in The Waiting Room, which made users concerned about not having enough time to enjoy ahead of the main event.
They were also curious about what The After Party entailed and what exclusive content the room provided.
Therefore, we went back to a more traditional user journey for a live event, which involves supporting artists at the beginning, purchasing merchandise and we suggested a short quiz that clearly states how long it takes to complete, as a fun way to pass the waiting.
We moved the majority of the premium content to The Afterparty, which comes after the main event and provides the perfect wind-down after the excitement of the show.
This also provided an area for us to deliver on brief requirements.
Such as — posing questions to the artist, saving content highlights; along with meeting the user's needs by providing potential for high-level, meaningful and curated content in the form of pre-recorded behind the scenes content and song breakdowns.
We created the hashtag #AppleAsktheArtist that would allow users to pose questions to the artist during The Afterparty Q&A using social media during the live event.
We tested and iterated on our designs as much as we could within the sprint time to produce a high-fidelity prototype that you can try below.
Develop Learnings:
- How testing can really inform your design and help you to accomplish the deliverables.
- How to approach such a large and detailed list of feature requirements.
Deliver — Proposed Solution
Next Steps
- More features to develop — games, merch.
- Develop a path for being notified about live streams.
- Develop the Afterparty and #AppleAsktheArtist.
- Further testing and iterations.
- VR and festival additions.
- Responsive design.
Key Learnings
- We were lucky to have gelled well as a team and dividing up work was smooth. However, there will always be challenges to overcome during teamwork, most of these internally with one’s self and/or in regards to communication, patience, compassion and overall motivation.
- I learned some good motivation techniques, especially while working remotely over zoom, to combat fatigue.
- I also learned when to take a backseat to let others develop and when was the right time to step up and take the lead.
Thanks for reading, you can find me on Linkedin.
