Listening Modes - A new feature for Amazon Music

Overview

Project duration: 3 weeks

My role: UX Designer

Client: Amazon Music

Scope: Add a new feature to Amazon Music

Tools: Figma, Miro, FigJam

Introduction

Pratt Institute collaborated with Amazon Music to create a design challenge that would run for 4 weeks and students were given a brief – to think of a new feature or a complete upgrade of the Amazon Music app for the next 3-5 years. I worked with 3 other graduate students – Jen Lee, Hailee Hoa Luong and Ruhee Shah on the project. We suggested a new feature that will help personalise the user’s listening experience to be added to the existing Amazon Music app. Our project was selected in the Top 3 finalists of this challenge and was presented to a panel from Amazon Music, including the head of design. It was also streamed online and was watched by over 1000 people.

A preview of our solution

How did we arrive at this feature?

Generative research

To kick-start the project, we started looking at music listening habits of people,  competitor apps and UX challenges of the existing Amazon Music application. We interviewed 8 participants during this process and combined our findings using FigJam. This helped us identify some themes and possible areas of intervention. Two most prominent concerns of our participants were that they felt overwhelmed by the number of songs and artists available on the music and that they preferred listening to different kinds of music based on their mood or activity. 

Interview notes

Interview notes

After compiling all of our interview findings,  we created an affinity map to understand common themes and came up with a HMW (How might we) question to help us arrive at a design solution.

"How might we create personalised listening experiences that cater to user's current mood and activity?"

Persona of our Target User

After analysing our findings from the generative research, we created a persona that would help us understand our users’ painpoints better. Casey is someone who listens to music as she does other tasks and activities throughout her day and prefers listening to her own playlists and being in control of her music choices. However, she sometimes feels that she has too many songs in her Library and has to manually select songs that fit her current mood and activity.

Creating wireframes and a test prototype

While ideating potential solutions for our problem statement, we found inspiration in the Focus mode of the iPhone and we decided to create a new feature that allows users to create different listening modes to sort their own music content from their Library at ease. We proceeded to create a detailed user journey map to outline the different steps of creating the mode and listening to music within the mode. We also made low-fidelity wireframes which we took to the users for testing.

Quick User Tests

Overall, we interviewed 6 participants to test the feasibility of our concept. We wanted to understand if users would really be interested in this feature and if it sounded useful to them. A lot of our users found the idea enticing and were successful at completing the tasks through our wireframes. We received helpful feedback from these sessions as well which we incorporated while creating the final designs.

“Personally I like the turn on/off feature because I like manage to my routine. It is also very helpful to just like refresh or rewind.”

“I would use it! I think that’s a good way of organizing different purposes of listening to music.”

“Love the option to select tempo! I also like that there are not too many options to choose from.”

Hi-fidelity designs

We allowed users to create custom modes for themselves based on their preferences. Users had the option to select predefined modes and modify them or create their own from scratch. They could control the music genres, artists, tempo as well as set a color theme for their mode. Once this mode is active, the music would be played and recommended based on these settings – making it ideal for users who want specific music for specific activities. 

View the prototype

Presenting the concept to Amazon Music

  • We were the top 3 finalists in the competition
  • We had the opportunity to present our concept to Amazon Music’s design team and Lead Designer
  • The event was live-streamed for Amazon employees and Pratt student community 
  • Received critical feedback from Amazon team
  • Limited timeframe for further iterations
    – Would have added a quick tour for user understanding
    – Proposed feature to auto-detect user activity via smartwatch
    – Aimed to enhance user routines and productivity
  • Overall, it was a great team effort to make this project fruitful and we learned a lot in the process of making it happen!