Context

Apple Music is a streaming service that allows you to listen to over 75 million songs. Its great features include the ability to download your favorite tracks and play them offline, lyrics in real time, listening across all your favorite devices, new music personalized just for you, curated playlists from our editors, and many more. All this is in addition to the exclusive and original content. Apple Music continues to be a leader in the media industry, with competitors like Spotify, YouTube, or Pandora. 

Apple Music keeps many of its users for multiple reasons, first, the app is preloaded onto all Apple Devices, which itself creates a frictionless experience for its users. Even if a user were to use the competitors of Apple Music, chances are, if they are an Apple user they are probably pretty loyal to the Apple brand. Most users probably don’t delete the app since it is pre-loaded onto Apple products, they know it’s safe for their phone because it was manufactured with it.

Challenge

Currently, there is no way for multiple users to edit and collaborate on a shared playlist.

Solution

Develop a feature that allows Apple Music’s users to create collaborative playlists that allow multiple users to edit a shared playlist.

These are the high-level goals and objectives:

1. Who would use a collaborative feature like this?

2. Why would people want to collaborate on playlists?

3. What current services do users currently use?

4. What makes a person want to make a playlist?

5. Some challenges or pain points that could arise using music streaming services?

Research

Secondary Research

Knowing what the problem was and what was lacking from Apple Music’s sharing capabilities currently, I took a good look at competitors and what sort of features those music services provided for their users. I also thought of services, that would be considered indirect competitors, that allow collaboration for its users and analyzed how the feature will be added into the flow of sharing playlists on Apple Music.

Competitive Analysis

What I found:

I prioritized features that research showed to be the most beneficial for users to start with and then listed long-term additions

1x1 User Research

After getting more insights from the competitive analysis, I was able to have a better understanding of what to ask potential users. Next, I created a script and narrowed it in on participants that have knowledge in all different types of music or collaboration services.

User interview summary:

4 Participants; Asked about their experiences with current or past music services

The Users

Define

Project goals

These are the high-level goals and objectives: 

• Build off of the sharing feature of the Apple Music playlists

  • Add an editor feature to all Apple Music playlists

    • The creator of the playlist will have the option to just add a collaborator with no editing abilities or they can allow the other user to have editing abilities

  • The editors will be able to add and delete music from the playlists

  • Discover if Apple’s competitors, for example, Spotify and Pandora have the features existing already

    • If the competition has this feature available, I will analyze how Apple’s version could be better

Ideate

Task Flow

I determined two major tasks that needed to be built out into a flow in order for this feature to succeed, the first was a user being invited to a collaboration playlist and the next was a user creating and sharing a collaborative playlist with another user.

User Flow

After sketching out flows with the help of my Apple Music app, screens that needed to be built out, were soon revealed. The pencil and paper method really mapped out how screens should look and flow. 

Sketched and digital

Low-fi and High-Fi Wireframes

I developed low-fi wireframes in Figma first to get structure and placement down. Starting with the low-fi wireframes helped me stay on brand with Apple Music’s flow. Once I was finished creating the low-fi wireframes, I was able to easily add in color for the high-fi, I used screenshots and Figma plugins to succeed in meaningful branding.

Sketched Wireframes

Digital Low-Fi Wireframes

High-Fi Wireframes

iPhone/Mobile Prototype

Using my high-fi wireframes, I began to create interactions between screens to create a prototype to begin usability testing. I created two flows for the prototype stage. Once the prototype was ready, I developed a list of test objectives. 

Tasks to complete:

1. Can you create a playlist, using music from the library and add a collaborator?

2. Open an invite to a collaborative playlist and join the playlist

Test

Usability Testing

Testing preparation:

To get accurate test results, I created a plan for usability testing. The plan outlined what next steps needed to be taken and how to execute them. View usability testing plan.

Conducting the testing:

Main goal: Gain insights on the user’s pain points, frustrations, and positive moments using the new feature of the app. Evaluate the insights and take into consideration improvements to be made. 

During the usability testing I learned: 

1. User patterns: Users go off of memory and click out of habit or some read before clicking

2. Potential solutions: Building out the prototype further

Confusions: Limitations in the prototype phase

Affinity map

After I had my results from the usability testing, I organized the information into an affinity map to clearly set apart the successes, frustrations, and patterns. This illustrated a clear path that I needed to take to evaluate the insights and take into consideration what improvements needed to be made and what could be made in the next step.

Learnings and next steps

Using my high-fi wireframes, I built out more website pages that would be necessary in a user completing a usability test. Each screen was developed using the UI kit and the style tile. Once the prototype was ready, I developed a list of test objectives.

Learnings:

After building out the prototype, I had a clearer understanding of what users look for in their music services. The stage that I found to be the most insightful was during the 1x1 interviews, this showed me the area of focus and how to prioritize feature additions. I learned from this that just because the competitors have many bells and whistles does not mean it is necessary for our current situation for this feature to be successful. If anything, this just speaks true to going off of research and not make assumptions about what users truly want or need.

Next steps:

Using Figma, I would continue to build the prototype out further in order to gain more insights from further usability testing. I think that this would be an essential addition to Apple’s successful music service and with more time and research it would surely be one to stand out even further from the competitors.