Credits and Snippets
Client:
Amazon Music
Hackathon Brief
Role:
Product Designer
UX Researcher
The Brief
What is the future of the listener’s experience with music and podcasts? Look 3-5 years out to develop a concept that leverages the Amazon Music service offerings and reach to bridge digital, in real life, communal, and individual experiences via the use of new devices and emerging technology.
Our Solution supporting Artists
We envision the future of Amazon music as a place listeners can discover new emerging artists through Snippets and support them by giving Credits.
A huge shoutout to the incredible team I got to work with on this project!
(L to R) Shubhangi Singh, Stacey O'Carroll, Katie Im, and John Kellejian
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Our solution:
Supporting Artists and Fans Experience
What are Snippets on Amazon Music?
Snippets is a feature that allows for short form artist and music discovery within the Amazon Music app. Listeners can scroll through liking songs to be added to their discoveries playlist and filtering their snippets by mood, activity, location or pure surprise! Listeners can also support artists directly from their snippets space. We would utilize geofencing to create this feature.
Credits are a way for listeners to directly support their favorite artists to keep making the music they love. Credits can be given monthly or as a once off. Listeners can also put their supported artists on their public profile!
What are Credits used for?
How do Credits benefit Amazon Music?
Enjoy our prototype!
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Process:
How did we decide to implement artist support?
We utilized the Nielsen Norman Design Thinking framework for the hackathon. Throughout the process we had incredible feedback and reached participants to survey through our collective social media which amassed responses from 5 continents and 12 countries including:
260 survey responses
16 User Interviews
5 Usability Tests
Who were our audience?
What did they do while streaming?
One of our survey questions asked participants what they do when they turn to streaming platforms to better understand the limitations of the time spent listening. There was an even split between commuting and excercising which highlighted that users listen to compliment an activity or improve their routines.
What did we learn about listeners feelings?
Gen Z and Millennials want to feel like the Artists they enjoy are represented fairly.
Music Equity
People are finding more of their new music through TikTok and Reels which is guiding new listening.
The New Radio
People don’t find streaming to be social but it acts as a tool to improve social experiences.
Social Listening
Where did we hear this?
We developed questions and narrowed our research area for our 16 interviews.
I mapped out our customer’s current journey with streaming based on our surveys and interviews to align our team viewpoint before ideation.
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How do you support both sides of the listening experience?
How might we improve Amazon Music so young music listeners can discover new music and see fair representation of their artists?
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People enjoy social referencing with friends
Spotify does a great job of letting users follow friends and see their activity which allows for users to discuss music with friends after seeing their recent playing history
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Supporting your favorite artists is very important
We saw how other platforms like patreon allow fans to completely support their favorite artists and creators to continue doing what they love.
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Soundcloud highlights trending artists no matter their following
It was interesting to see a feature that allows creators and artists of all sizes promoted on the Soundcloud homepage.
We held 30 minute sketching sprint sessions after synthesizing our research. We voted discussed and voted using sticky notes where ideas we agreed were important appeared. These sessions were amazing as there was so much crossover in our product solutions even though we individually sketched!
Getting ideas on paper!
How do these ideas fit into the functionality of the app?
Information Architecture Revamp
We revised Amazon Music’s Information Architecture to include access to our new features and figure out the user steps in each flow.
Prototyping our solution at medium and high fidelity
Medium Fidelity allowed us to trouble shoot steps, what didn’t make sense or what needed extra onboarding information
We created over 30 screens to complete the prototyping stage of our solution. The prototype had full capability for the user to move between all functions which is what we wanted for our user testing.
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Does our feature make sense and appeal to users?
User Testing
5 Users | 22-30 Years Old | 15 minute Sessions
We asked participants the following questions to gain insights on the appeal and overall usability of the features:
What do you think you can do on this page?
What do you think this feature does?
Would you use the Snippets feature to discover new music?
What are your impressions about the Snippet filters.
Would you use the Credits feature? If yes, to what capacity?
What are your overall thoughts and impressions?
What we learned from users!
Increased feature explanations
Adding more information about what the new features of credits and specific filters mean
Making filter options more discoverable
Increasing the visibility of call to actions with buttons like Filters
Incentivize listeners by highlighting credits
Incentivize users to give their credits to artists by showing the impact
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Engaging audiences with our proposals
Client and Graduation Show Presentations
Presenting our winning project during the Pratt Institute Graduation Info Show!
What did Amazon Music think?
The team was incredibly impressed with the depth of research, product development and teamwork that our team displayed throughout the hackathon process. We were delighted to present to 40+ Amazon Music Designers, Vice President of Design and over 150 Amazon Employees through livestream.
Personal Reflection
It was amazing to work through the whole design process with such a hardworking team!
I found letting yourself have time to do in-depth research really benefits the final output. At times it felt crazy to spend two of the three weeks on research but the insights we gained through continued research were integral to our project.
Thank you for looking through my work!
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