We recreated our interface map via Sketch and aimed to fix the multitude of problems that surfaced from our last round of testing. This version had clearer visual cues, stronger visual hierarchy, and more intuitive navigation through different elements of the app.
To our dismay, users ran into many of the original problems we sought to fix. After a lot of research, testing, and some intense soul-searching, we realized that the roots of the problems lied in the features themselves.
PROBLEMS/SOLUTIONS
1. Posting music recommendations was confusing and tedious, and wasn't necessarily the best representation of an area's trending music.
We decided to remove posting music and instead replace it with an automatic feed of what users are listening to through connected platforms like Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, etc. This allows for more content that accurately reflects the music being played in an area, as well as removing tedious and confusing steps for users.
2. Upvoting and submitting music became complicated when users were looking at areas besides their own.
In conjunction with the posting solution, we replaced our voting system with an automated running total of the amount of times a song had been listened to. Again, we felt this was a more accurate representation of what music was being listened to in an area, and it removed another confusing facet of our app that wasn't crucial to our main goal.
3. Multiple methods of playing music, disjointed comment sections, and confusing navigation made it difficult to seamlessly use all the features of our app.
Instead of having separated static screens for each feature, we brought together multiple features into dynamic single-screen interfaces that created a clearer sense of a users' place in the app.
We began by interviewing multiple people from various musical backgrounds - everyone from casual listeners to music enthusiasts. We gained some valuable insight into points of friction across this spectrum, and narrowed down our results to three main pain points: Distracting features, difficult playlist creation, and incomplete music libraries.
Cross platform library integration proved to be the most feasible and opportunistic design, so we moved forward with this idea as our main foundation. (Spoiler alert - this one ended up not panning out.)