Recreating the live music experience during the pandemic with Apple Music
Supporting independent artists and enhancing user-musician connection during COVID 19.
Overview
● Sprint duration: 2 weeks
● Type: Concept project as part of the General Assembly UXDI course.
● Deliverables: Research insight & findings, sketches, evidence of testing, high fidelity prototype and presentation.
● Tools used: Miro, Figma
● Team: Me, Catherine Gates, Izzy Silverman, Charlie Bullman
● My role: Comparative research, interviews, ideation, sketching, designing and iterating new pages, UX writing, usability testing, developing high fidelity prototype and final design.
The Client and their problem
“Estimates suggest that Apple Music had 72 million subscribers worldwide in June 2020, up by four million from December of the previous year. Apple Music is the second largest music streaming service worldwide, competing with market leader Spotify.” — statista.com
Following the impact of COVID-19, Apple recognised the importance of continuing to offer music to its members while further supporting their artists.
With this in mind, we were tasked with redesigning their app to create a way for artists/musicians to create ‘artist rooms’ on their profile where they can host chats, acoustic gigs, podcasts and where they interact with their audience. To access these ‘rooms’ users would need to support the artist with a small membership, amount chosen by the artist.
The new design needed to encompass the following features:
● Ability to access a ‘music/artist room’ hub
● Ability to pay for the membership
● Ability to browse and follow artists and get notified when they are live-streaming from their room
● Ability to request to talk or message (both via video and/or via mic) in the music room
● Ability to see the monthly support that the artist gets
● Ability to praise artists with a sort of ‘like/clap’ system
● Ability to save key moments of a ‘music room’ to easily find when event is finished
● Ability to access ‘music room’ history
● Ability to have breakout rooms with other users
● Ability to message the artist privately and ask questions
Initial thoughts
- Will people be open to paying to support independent artists with extra membership cost on top of their apple music monthly subscription?
- We need to discover what users want from their favourite artists, how they may want to connect with them, how much interaction they want with other users etc.
- We need to think about these proposed new features and how to present them to the user, specifically live streams/event booking.
With the brief clear, we were ready to start the discovery phase of the UX process and dive into research.
Discover — Digging deeper into the problem.
Competitor research
The brief was proposing introducing new features which would expand Apple Music’s offering beyond a music streaming service.
We looked at direct competitors Spotify and their new ‘Make a contribution’ feature which they had added to support struggling musicians during the COVID pandemic. The brief referenced a potential ‘music rooms’ feature which would facilitate multiple interactions with users such as hosting chats and gigs. With this in mind, we researched apps with livestream features such as Facebook, Instagram, Youtube and Twitch and noted the range of interactions available with each type of stream.
We researched event booking apps such as Dice and theatre websites such as the Barbican and National Theatre, to see how they had adapted to connect with their audience to release livestream or pre-recorded content during the pandemic.
Our discovery? This new feature could combine many of the key features from our competitor analysis, and sit somewhere between a livestream, an event booking app and Apple Music as a prominent music streaming service.
User research
We interviewed 5 users who had some connection with or interest in live music. We asked them about supporting artists, on demand extra features and their current use of music streaming services to gain a broader understanding of how users relate to music apps.
We mapped out all our findings and identified some key themes of user behaviour found from our interviews.
Key findings:
- Users want to connect with artists. Our feedback highlighted that people are interested in interacting with artists and want to know their perspectives on the music industry and the song writing process. They are less interested in hearing gossip and want to forge more of a connection where possible.
- Users want access to exclusive content. Users were eager to see more live performances, behind the scenes content focusing on how songs or videos were made, and Q&A’s with the artist.
- Users do not want to pay extra membership on top of subscription services. Many users commented they already pay so many subscriptions so paying more on top of the Apple Music subscription fee would be excessive. People noted they were happy to pay for one off extra events as opposed to a monthly fee and would maybe pay one off for the opportunity to interact more with the artist.
- Users do not want to interact with others in any depth whilst on the app or watching livestreams. Some users said minimal interaction would be preferable as they are mainly there for an individual experience if the event is remote.
Define — Who are we helping and what are we helping them to do?
Using these insights, we detailed the average user’s journey trying and failing to enjoy live music during the pandemic. We highlighted key pain points in the user journey map above, surrounding feeling disconnected from artists and being disillusioned with the content that was available online. We kept this in mind whilst defining the key problem and continuing into design stages.
Using our research findings, we created a representation of a typical Apple Music user in order to help focus and define the user problem.
As detailed below, Martin is a party animal who misses going to gigs and loves learning more about the creative process of music making.
Martin’s problem can be defined as follows:
Martin needs a better way to interact and engage with his favourite music artists, while accessing live and on-demand content, because his restricted ability to attend real life music events during lockdown has made him feel disconnected.
This research enabled us to think of more ways we could help Martin and explore areas to improve on the app to address his problem. As we approached design studios and sketches, we considered the following thoughts:
How might we make it easier for users to connect with their favourite artists?
How might we engage users in livestreams?
How might we bring the gig atmosphere into the home?
Develop — What did we try?
Design studio
We facilitated a design studio as a group, where we considered the questions above and sketched out initial ideas to help create the music rooms and engage users with their favourite artists. We kept the initial stages very broad to allow ideas to be creative. With the ideas from the design studio, we created a clear user flow to demonstrate where the artist’s rooms would be found on the existing app and how a user would engage with a livestream and other behind the scenes features from their favourite artists.
Design Iterations
We sketched the above user flow out, then tested with 6 users from sketches to low and high fidelity wireframes. We had a few challenges arise in testing as detailed below.
Challenge : where to include extra charges to support independent artists on a subscription service.
As we started sketching out this initial flow, we encountered an issue trying to include elements of the brief that had proved unpopular during interviews. Our insights had shown people were willing to pay extra for one-off events such as livestreams as opposed to an extra membership fee on top of their subscription to Apple Music.
This one off fee didn’t support independent artists so we introduced an optional donation fee for artists at several points of the user journey through the app to still allow support for independent artists. As we began testing the flow as shown above in a sketch format, our users were confused and we were met with the following questions:
Why would I pay a donation to a huge artist like Dua Lipa?
Is she really the person who needs a donation during COVID?
Where does this donation go?
These testing insights were really helpful in highlighting the need to include clear UX writing to guide the user along when dealing with a financial interactions. When dealing with money, our testing showed users want absolute transparency in knowing where their money would be used, as well as a checkout system they could trust. As testers appeared less inclined to donate towards globally successful artists such as Dua Lipa, we made it clear donations were going towards the less well known support acts. This solved the problems that arose in testing and also stayed true to the brief and interview insights by allowing users to connect and support artists.
Solution : clear and simple language about where users money is directed and donations towards support acts
Challenge : What is the Afterparty and the Waiting room?
We wanted to heighten the live music experience for the user as our interview insights illustrated users were interested in behind the scenes content and prolonging the experience and atmosphere of live music whilst on the app.
We created a waiting room page before each live event which gave users the option to play a quiz related to the artist and learn more about the supporting artist. We also created an afterparty page which allowed users to watch a Q&A with the artist (questions could be asked within the livestream), see pre-recorded behind the scenes content and show highlights, and shop merchandise. User testing informed the content we included in these pages, as people were initially confused with what was available in earlier wireframes, we knew we needed high quality images and clear delineated sections on each page when we created the final design.
Solution : Signpost information clearly and highlight sections so users know the purpose of the pages.
With this and a number of other iterations through testing, we were able to create our final prototype.
Deliver — Our proposed solution
The final prototype
Our final design included:
- Artist room: extension to already existing artist’s page on Apple Music, available for one-off events and featuring behind the scenes content and opportunities to connect with artist.
- Donations: in place of the originally proposed added membership fee, to help support independent artists in the pandemic.
- Waiting room page: to build excitement for the live event, featuring opportunity to learn more about the artist and supporting artists.
- Livestream booking and streaming page: featuring opportunities to donate, clap and ask questions to the artists for after gig Q&A
- Afterparty page: to continue the party atmosphere after the event and access behind the scenes content
Next steps
- Develop flow for being notified about livestreams
- Develop the Afterparty and #AppleAsktheArtist
- More testing and more iterations
- Investigating VR and festival additions and responsive design
Learnings
- Don’t assume. My personal views on live streaming and music led me to assume most people wouldn’t be interested in this feature and would want to wait until live music was available in person. This was not true! My assumptions coloured my view initially so I was so happy to get great insights from a number of people during interviews and user testing.
- I love working as a group. I was apprehensive about working with 3 other people to complete this project but we all brought different ideas to the table, shared the workload and produced a great solution for the user.
- Research is key. This is the most in depth research I had done on a UX project as the brief asked for so many features which spanned different apps and websites. I found it really interesting digging into various arts, gaming and music streaming platforms to inform our final designs.
Thank you for reading! If you’d like to learn more about me or my work, please get in touch on LinkedIn or visit my portfolio.
