Apple Music New Feature
Case Study
Apple Music is a popular music streaming app that was launched back in 2015. Since it’s launch, Apple Music started with 6.5 million users, it’s grown almost tenfold since then, to about 60 million subscribers.
Under anyone’s metrics, that is impressive. Although, even for a smash hit like Apple Music, there is always room for improvement. With that, allow me to introduce to you the purpose of this Case Study.
Project Brief:
Select a popular app and develop an innovative feature that the app is currently missing. The project will be conducted in small teams of 2 to 3 people.
Introduction
Picking an app to improve was not difficult, the members in my group and I were all streaming app users. Also, we always heard about the feud between Apple music and one of its direct competitors, Spotify, so we decided quickly on Apple Music to be the app we improve.
Business Analysis
To start the project, we conducted secondary research to learn a bit about our users.
In order to understand user expectations and general mental models revolving music streaming apps, we put together a Competitive Feature Analysis chart to display differences between Apple Music and its main competitors.
It’s easy to spot the obvious features but hold of ideation to the users.
We then made a Market Positioning chart to map out where these same competitors matched up on our company branding parameters. We went ahead with User-Centered Design and level of Innovation as the two-axis for our chart.
UX Process
Now that we have some competitive research done, we have an idea of the market and the direction we want to drive the company in with the new feature.
We want to focus on what Apple Music’s users need so naturally, we run to gather user interviews. In total, we conducted 7 interviews, two together and the rest on our own. We put together an affinity map from our qualitative data.
Next up, our AMAZING storyboard. Yes while simple looking at first glance, this was actually very helpful in giving us a visual and determining what’s really important to Apple Music users. In this case, being Apple to navigate the app and find new music easily.
That brings us to the fun part. Brainstorming. This is where things got interesting. We had three HMW’s (How Might We) to solve:
- Make it easier to find new music
- Simplify App Navigation
- Add value to reduce the pain of not having a free version
Once we all had come up with solutions individually we got together and discussed them. We organized them using the MoSCoW method while also organizing them in terms of Impact vs Effort. Using this tool allowed us to discover our MVP: A Personalized Playlist Quiz/Generator. Why? Because this would be a solution to a major pain point our users are experiencing according to our data. The Pain of not being able to find new music because the current recommended section in Apple Music is useless. So we go to designing it.
Next came the User Job and Feature stories, each shows context to the need goals and even pains of our main users.
JOB STORY: “When I’m home and I’m stressed, I want to listen to a playlist on apple music, so that I can relax.”
FEATURE STORY: “When using Apple Music. I want to be able to use the personalized playlist feature so that I can find new music customized to my taste.”
Then we created a flow chart so we could visualize the steps our user would need to take in order to complete their desired task.
Then we constructed our Lo-Fi prototype below.
Then we designed our lo-fi prototype and tested it. These are our results:
- 5 Tests
- 96 Usability Score
- 9.1% Misclick Rate
- 2.4 seconds average duration rate
The Main complaint we received was that people weren’t sure where to go at first. They were confused.
So on we went to the Mid-Fi Prototype.
Using what we learned from the Lo-Fi we made a few changes. Mainly we added an onboarding pop up for first-time users. Here are our results from mid-fi tests:
- 12 Tests
- 77 Usability Score
- 13.2% Misclick rate
- 2.8 seconds average duration rate
Again, the main complaint we received was that users weren’t quite sure where to go at the beginning which led to some confusion.
So we decided to pivot a bit and we landed on the solution of taking users directly to the new feature after clicking “Go” on the onboarding pop up.
Next up was our Hi-Fi Prototype but before we designed it we wanted to organize everything we would be using to design it into an Atomic Design file.
Then came the long-awaited Hi-Fi Prototype including the changes we made after our mid-fi tests.
Now that we have this gorgeous Hi-Fi Prototype build we thought it would be important to list out some metrics that would give us a guideline on whether or not the Hi-Fi was a success or a failure. They are as follows:
Success Metrics:
- More people are using the new personalized playlist feature
- Average time spent on app increases
- More people use suggested or recommended playlists
Failure Metrics:
- No one uses personalized playlist feature
- Average time spent on app stays the same or decreases
- Fewer people use suggested or recommended playlists
Conclusion
With that concludes the case study, I learned so much on this challenge. My main takeaway was not being attached to your design. Design thinking can be a back and forth a bit, from tool to tool. Always go where the user takes you, that way you can be sure to make something that matters, and has an impact!
