Lists vs. Journeys
Week 5 in review
Last week, we challenged the plausibility of our music application’s concept in order to feel more comfortable with pursuing it. This week, we challenged the plausibility of our application’s execution.
For Dory, this meant diving into the Spotify web API and creating a simple web application as a proof-of-concept. She created a quick, efficient solution, and allowed us to see the reality of our solution as a product. Check out her blog post to see her process!
As for myself, I focused on mapping out a consistent information architecture (IA) for the application. We considered this as a blueprint for a user’s movement through and engagement with the app.
We used the whiteboard to flesh out an IA, including points of entry, expected pages, and the links between them. This encouraged us to think not only about the user flow, but about the precision of the vocabulary we were using for the app.
An example of this: we were using the word “playlist” generically to describe a meaningful list of music, but drafting the IA made it evident that we were working with two different kinds of “playlists”: one that acts as a completed record, and one that traces the current temporary listening session. The former is closer to the traditional definition of playlist; the latter is more interactive and is less about the music than it is about the experience. For now, we’re respectively calling these items a “list” and a “journey”.
(On a side note, I’m not sure if there’s a convention for IAs to be vertical, but at 5'1" I could only manage to do them horizontally on the whiteboard. I like to think this gives my IA a bit of personality.)
To further organize our application architecture, I put together a cleaner, briefly annotated Keynote draft:
As seen here, we identified three distinct points of entry into the application experience:
- The first access for a new user
- Entry with no current active listening session, meaning that the user intends to start a new listening session or revisit an old one
- Entry with a current active listening session, meaning that the user intends to continue, modify or end the current session
I’m currently focusing on how to sustain the user’s interest through every possible interaction with the application experience. We’ve identified a possible weakness with how we are presenting the saved lists. The journeys are novel, dynamic, and interesting because they constantly seek and reflect the user’s feedback — but the exciting interaction ends when the journey becomes a permanent list. The way it currently exists, the library of saved lists is more or less a graveyard of journeys. We need to figure out a way to add a more lasting value to these lists.
Again, we’d love to hear your response to our work. How are you using and reusing playlists? What would make you want to revisit a saved list?
