Heyo (fictitious) is a startup company that launched a music streaming app (internal app) two years ago. It is a freemium model with a mobile-web experience and a mobile app for iOS and Android. The app has been well received and has a healthy user base of free users. They now hired me to design a paid product that allows users to subscribe and pay a monthly fee.
Jan 2- Feb 3,2021
Four weeks (90 hours)
Sole UX/UI designer
Visual designer
Laura Trouiller( Mentor) and me
Design a paid product to help increase revenue.
1. Design a better listening experience than the other competitor.
2. Design an effective promotion way.
Why I chose the second item as the solution?
1. Ask users to complete upgrade task.
2. Let users rate the willingness to upgrade for products.
... increase user initiative to explore the product by a new promotion way?
...get users to quickly understand the additional value of the product through new promotion way?
Incorporate scavenger hunting games into the product to increase new users' willingness to explore, guide them to understand the added value of the product, and let them quickly understand the value of premium service.
Users want to speed up the interaction and find what they are looking for easily. Micro-interactions is very straightforward way to guide them and leads them to a flexible user experience.
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.
Add a personalized design to create a sense of intimacy among users. And make users aware of the importance of the product in their lives. And in turn, increase the success rate of the sales pitch
Provide multiple ways for free users to upgrade their accounts. Make the subscription process smooth and trouble-free.
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 use the Double Diamond framework to help solve this problem because I wanted to validate my solution through usability testing and iterate on it quickly.
Secondary Research
Competitive Study
Secondary research
Survey (10 participants), and short interview(5 participants)
I started with a survey to help me get some quantitative resources on what are the criteria people use to choose music streaming apps?
Research insight 1
Besides music library and the subscription price, value is the main reason for subscribing. People won’t pay for premium if they don’t know how to access the additional-value.
Research insight 2
Young adults are largely influenced by the people around them when selecting apps, and prefer music apps with social features.
Competitive study
Beyond the criteria, I also want to know how industry leaders promote their premium services. So I did a competitive study.
Research insight 1
The promotional forms of all the products are too similar, without highlights and competitiveness, and users have already resisted these models.
Research insight 2
Insufficiently comprehensive description of paid services, leading users to miss out on maximizing benefits.
Define user group
As a streaming app, Heyo has diverse types of users, but consider the use case and the goal of increasing business revenue, college students would be our ideal target user.
Persona
User Story
User story 1
“As a budget-conscious student, I want to know the value of the app before I pay for it, so I can be a smart consumer and not waste my money.”
User story 2
“As a busy student, I want to get to know a product quickly so that I can save time and make a quick decision on whether to continue using the product.”
HMW
Journey Map
Crazy Eights
HMW
... increase user initiative to explore the product by a new promotion way?
...get users to quickly understand the additional value of the product through new promotion way?
I used crazy eights method to help me think out of box. Then I asked some friends, explained the background, and asked them to make a vote. Finally we selected four ideas.
Journey map
A journey map helped me understand the process Dianne would go through to reach her goal and how she would feel at the time. And I found shorten users' exploration time and help them to access the additional-value of the product quickly would be a good opportunity to solve Danne's problem.
Crazy eights
When I identify the parts of the user experience that can be improved, I wanted to be able to quickly come up with some solutions. So I used crazy eights method to help me think out of box. Then I asked some friends, explained the background, and asked them to make a vote. Finally we selected four ideas.
Building Information architecture by user flow
With those ideas in mind,I chose to use user flow to help me have a clear know the product functionality, and sketch out the outline of the basic screens.
User Flow
Sketches
Wireframes
Once I satisfied with the sketches, I jumped to Figma to create lo-fi wireframes and did exploration on promoting page.
Design lo-fi screens and explore
Usability Test
1st round usability test by wireframes
Methodology
5 Participants (21 - 30+years old)
30 of minutes
Remotely
Moderated usability study
Testing finding
Before jump to hi-fi prototyping, I created a visual style guideline to help me keeping the visual consistency and share it with others. The visual style aims at creating a trendy, friendly, and interesting personality.
High Fidelity Mock ups
High Fidelity Prototype
Design Hi-fi screens, trade-off, revise, and validate iteratively.
Based on the direct feedback from the tester and indirect insight from my observations, I reflected the improvement on the hi-fi prototype.
Usability Test
Usability test by hi-fi screens
After the update, I conducted another round usability test of the hi-fi prototype with the 5 participants remotely by Zoom.
Compared with the test result of the wireframes version, the latest test result showed:
Try the prototype
1. Refine the design based on the second round finding and create payment screens.
2. Consider edge case beyond the happy path.like fail to pay or subscribe, can't find the song or artist, fail to load the content, etc.
3. Think about other user group’s needs and accessibility design, like what full time employee need when they working, or how to protect teenagee from some unsutable works.
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.
From research to mid-fi wireframe, designing an engaging experience to help mothers with postpartum depression issues complete lessons enjoyably.
From research to hi-fi prototype, designing an effective experience to help travelers create a trip plan in collaboration with others.
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