Heyo is a startup company that launched a music streaming product two years ago. It is a freemium model that has a mobile-web experience and a mobile app for both iOS and Android.
The company’s business strategy was to first build a user base by offering a free product and then evolving the feature set to monetize on a premium (paid) product. At this point, the product has been well received and has a healthy user base of free users. They now hired me to design an experience that allows users to subscribe and pay a monthly fee. I found the existing flow for returning users does not give the user an opportunity or a compelling reason to subscribe.
TARGET USERS
18-24 years old (Gen Z)
HIGH LEVEL TIMELINE
Four weeks (90 hours)
Gamified the app, rewarding users for exploring features.
Encouraging users to explore the app by asking and rewarding them to join the challenge.
Show the shortcut tutorial intuitively by micro-interactions.
Shortcuts help users to speed up the interaction which leads to a flexible user experience. And micro-interactions are a great way to show how to use them.
Personalize the app for new users and returning users.
Display the different layouts for the different users based on the music taste. Users can follow the artists they like, save the song and create their playlist.
Get to know what your friend is listening now and create collaborative playlists with your friends.
Users can create collaborative playlists with their friends if they want. Users can also listen to the playlist that their friends created in a public model.
I chose to start with a competitive study as this is a quick way to help me get familiar with the music streaming industry and learn what the industry leaders did.
I downloaded and interacted with Pandora, Spotify, and Youtube Music to test the features and I also checked the reviews of those three apps in the app store to see what the users said.
Because understanding the value that users get from a music streaming platform and their willingness to pay is essential to uncovering the music industry’s business model. So I set out to better understand the behaviors of Gen-Zers and what influences their decision-making when it comes to subscription-related concerns by secondary research at this phase.
Based on the direct feedback from the tester and indirect insight from my observations, I reflected the improvement on the hi-fi prototype.
Improvement on usability experience of the artists selected page
Improvement on the understanding of the introduce page.
Improvement on the willingness of reading the task page.
100% of users didn’t feel compelled to go premium.
Though stakeholders and I were satisfied with the design result so far, I’d like to perfect the project with some detailed parts, as the saying goes, the devil is in the details.
I found it’s hard to measure converted rating accurately on a prototype, but we can measure the impact by selecting the correct question and task and doing a usability test or AB test, then we can get a very intuitive answer by comparing the results of different versions to see how much percent it is improved.
We can barely understand a group population without knowing their backgrounds. In the process of getting to know them, we can really understand how their opinions are formed, what their real needs are, and what problems they are generally facing.
Do not take it for granted that others think or interact the same way you do. You are not the user, the only way to validate your assumptions is to do the test with real users iteratively.
© 2021 by Hongyue Zhao
