Brand: SoundCloud
Project: Desktop & Mobile App Feature Integration
Timeframe: 2 Weeks
As the world’s leading social sound platform, SoundCloud wants to expand the way users interactively share music with one another. The ask was to design a new feature that allows users to collaborate online, DJing their select tracks with other users in real time.* I worked with two additional UX designers on this project and took on the role as project lead — determining and delegating daily tasks to meet our two week deadline. It was our job to research and design the new DJ feature that would seamlessly integrate into the current site as well as appeal to the SoundCloud demographic.
ResearCh & DIscovery
With a broad brief on what the DJ feature should be, it was important to define the term DJing. Through competitive research, surveys, and interviews, we discovered that today people consider DJIng as the selecting of songs for others to enjoy. This definition would be the basis of our feature design.
“Someone who curates music for other people.”
”The mixing of two or more songs.”
”Picking songs.”
“A conversation between a curator and dance floor.”
Contextual analysis was also conducted to determine current user behavior of the SoundCloud platform — how would the new DJ feature integrate into the current website and mobile app? We noticed users of SoundCloud were very familiar interacting with the site navigation. For desktop, the DJ feature would be integrated on the homepage. For mobile, on the primary navigation.
Personas
From our user interviews, we developed 4 personas to define the target groups. The personas influenced which design features we would prioritize in order to complete the task in the timeframe allotted. Emphasis was put on our primary persona - Tony.
FEatures
My team and I used feature prioritizing methods such as affinity mapping and MoSCoW to determine which functions we would build out for the DJ feature. Functions were narrowed down based on brief specifications as well as persona needs.
- MUST: Users must be able to collaborate on a playlist in a room.
- SHOULD: Users should be able to interact with other users.
- COULD: Users could be able to save DJ sets.
- WONT: Users won't be able to add mixing effects.
Wireframes
We started design by first sketching the prioritized features to give us a basis for the design, and then transformed them into low to medium fidelity wireframes for testing. Through usability testing, it was apparent we had overall language issues in addition to missing content. The most challenging aspect of the design process was the DJ Room. We needed to be able to visually communicate the functions of this entirely new feature while keeping in line with SoundCloud's brand. We went through 3 iterations before landing at the current design.
MOCKUPs
Final mockups tested well with users and answered the primary needs of the personas defined. Through testing, we validated that users were able to join/create rooms, add music, and understand overall page content for the DJ Tab and DJ Room on both mobile and desktop.
*This project was completed as part of the UXDI curriculum at General Assembly.