DUET.
UI+UX DESIGN / FALL 2022
OVERVIEW
SONIC SOCIALIZING.
Duet is a music streaming concept that aims to integrate the social experiences that music facilitates into an application. Users are able to imbue their personality into their profiles, while creating meaningful connections to friends and the music that they love.
Read the full case study below, or skip down to the final design.
RESEARCH
INITIAL RESEARCH
To get a sense of where to start, I conducted two interviews and created a survey that received 49 responses. Given initial observations, most people used either Spotify or Apple Music as their streaming platform. For the scope of the project, I decided to focus on the two services. From the full scope of the data received, I came to three key insights.
1. USER FOCUS
Spotify’s platform is discovery-based, where content is curated for the
user. Alternatively, Apple Music is aimed to cater to the user’s intent, where content is curated by users. This insight became clear after looking at how people interacted with both platforms.
Respondents who said they valued algorithm suggestions tended to use Spotify, so I classified the platform as “curated for”. On the other hand, users who chose Apple Music mentioned a specific “tangibility” that they liked, so I classified the platform as “curated by”.
This was also validated by the language used by both platforms. On the
left side, you’ll see Apple Music’s search screen that prompts the user
to look for “Artist, Songs, Lyrics, and More”. More specifically, they are prompting the user to look for something specific that they had in mind. By contrast, Spotify simply asks “What do you want to listen to?”, which is more open-ended and can lead to a variety of outputs, ranging from artists or songs to an entirely different medium like podcasts or audio books. The broader description enables a larger range of choices generated for the user to choose from.
2. PEER PRESSURE
People cited that they didn’t use existing social features in apps because they wanted to avoid judgement from friends/followers; there is a pressure— when sharing— to play “good music”. One of the biggest challenges for Duet was figuring out how to implement these social features, while making sure people felt comfortable and encouraged to share their music. This was one of the biggest inspirations behind the profile feature on Duet.
3. DEVICE USAGE
The final insight helped guide how/when respondents used a music streaming platform. It informed existing technologies that could be used in the experience, with things like Apple’s U1 chips that could potentially add to the social aspect.
MARKET
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
From this point, I conducted a competitive analysis between Apple Music and Spotify’s marketing. Spotify is widely seen, with what could be considered their best known campaign being Spotify Wrapped. Using listening data, Spotify connects people’s individual listening habits to a greater collective community. Apple Music, on the other hand, has far less of an advertising presence.
When looking at the market as a whole, Spotify takes the greater share of users, and reflects what they value as well. The sharp pull-away in 2019-2020 is a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, where people were isolated and wanting to feel like they were still connected to a community, which is something that Spotify enabled them to do. Based on this finding, I made sure that Duet capitalized on making sure the user feels like a part of a community, with the ability to share and connect with other users.
WIREFRAMING
With early sketches, my goal was to further explore different features that could allow for socializing, whether it took from existing ones or taking inspiration from other non-music services. While there were elements of a lot of the ideas, the highlighted ideas were ones that I chose to focus the most on based on positive feedback from user testing. One of the areas I focused the most on was the user profile and how users could both be encouraged to share their music and interact with other users. I used Hinge as a reference point, and played around with adding prompts to profiles to make them more interactive. Another feature is the profile background that would populate with different colors that represent various genres of music; the more a user listens to a genre, the more the correlating color would populate their profile.
DIRECTIONAL TESTING
Once I got a sense of the direction I wanted to head with the screen states, I went into Figma and got to prototyping different variations of each design. The third iteration is the one that received the most positive feedback in testing, with users citing the compactness and a good combination of the features from the previous iterations.
The second screen that took more time to develop was the profile page. Like previously mentioned, I wanted to include a more interactive profile experience by including prompts that other users could directly interact with. The third iteration seemed to provide the best mix-in of the prompts scattered throughout the profile, and the information one would expect when scrolling through.
VISUAL LANGUAGE
I gravitated towards brighter colors for the visual language because I knew that the app would have a good amount of personalization, so there should be a good mix of colors that work together. I referenced a lot of very bold colors— as seen in the mood board— and then worked out how they would work as gradients for features like the personalized profile.
FINAL DELIVERABLE
The final iteration of Duet gives the user a personalized music experience that encourages them to share their music with friends and other users. To take a look at the working prototype, please click on the button below.
