Endlesss: A UX Case Study
Live team project: 3 UX Designers –Time frame: 2 weeks
About 100 years ago, live music was everywhere. When recorded music came along, we lost that spontaneity. Today, with a smartphone and Endlesss, everyone, everywhere, anytime can have fun making music again.
Endlesss works like a chat tool but with the ability to make and share riffs (snippets of music), which friends can edit creating unique sounds together.
As a team, we were tasked with developing a way for users to discover new sounds and people outside their current circle, while taking into account the negative impact social media platforms have on their users, avoiding bullying and peer pressure.
We started out with lots of ideas in the Discovery phase, then narrowed our possible direction during the Problem definition phase to widen our options again during the Development phase and narrowed down again to create our Solution.
With the team, we started by conducting a competitive analysis to highlight any areas we could learn from. Focusing on some of the Music streaming services such as Spotify and other music making/sharing platforms such as SoundCloud and Audiu, chat apps such as WhatsApp.
We then created a survey, which over 50 users completed within 2 days. This survey not only gave us insights into some of the habits and expectations music makers have.
From there we were able to target core users to set up follow up interviews with, and contact the alpha user group at Endlesss via their Facebook group and Slack channel. We used affinity mapping and the user flows to organize our findings and confirm areas of focus.
Music is a personal experience from the choice of genre, to the choice of instrument and we found that for our core users, music was an everyday activity: making, listening to it, reading about it.
The creative process can often be lonely and it can be challenging to find collaborators so connecting with people is important whether it is to promote yourself or grow as a musician.
We created a two personas to encompass the different user types we encountered, as well as two scenarios to cover our different user journeys.
Matt is looking for new riffs and artists to collaborate with on Endless. Matt’s happy going through a rabbit hole of discovery where
he is on a spontaneous journey of choice.
Ollie heard from his friend there is a guy with new electronic sounds and riffs that he should check out. Ollie needs a way to find these new sounds on Endless, connect and share with a wider music loving community.
We conducted regular meetings with the Endlesss team. In one instance we met with the team to conduct a Design Studio to share some of our assumptions and to incorporate the different stakeholder’s thoughts and ideas about the platform.
Key concepts: histogram of riffs, connected link searching, random suggestions to take users out of their bubble as well as QR code style location based jams.
All the concepts that emerged from that session, led to a deepening of relationships in music communities, creating bonds in both digital and physical spaces.
After comparing concepts to our research findings and both the business and user goals, we brought some of these concepts into wireframing and to user test some of our core users (in person and remotely).
By introducing a newsfeed to the app to showcase new riffs, users were left confused as to how to navigate within the app.
A navigation bar was introduced along with tab bars to create a clear division between the private groups and public channels.
Within the prototyping phase, based on user findings, we changed our news feed page concept to include not only people the users are jamming with but also these people’s collaborators.
When tasked with searching within the app, users would navigate to the discovery tab on the bottom navigation bar first. The search bar was therefore removed out of the news feed and the icon was changed to reflect this.
During user testing there was confusion as to where people were posting to. By updating the title to include the defined task, it cleared any confusion.
Based on user feedback the option of tagging people was added, locations, social media for extra exposure as well as introducing #genres for organic genre creation and to help organize the riffs by genre for easier discovery by other users.
We discovered that users wanted to have the ability to give a quick visual feedback when they liked a riff, which would also help in offering users more a more custom experience, by updating the content based on these choices. But we wanted to avoid the pressure metrics can create, so we went with the idea of applause rather than likes and removed the ability to view how many users had applauded.
When posting riffs, users also needed a confirmation when sending their post and this was an opportunity to create positive reinforcement in the form of a high five.
When it came to the public profile, we discovered users liked the idea of following another user based on their jams and likes and/or ask to jam. So this feature was incorporated.
We also explored what users wanted to see when viewing someone’s profile:
Endlesss: A UX Case Study
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