Music Drop

Overview

Opportunity

Great need for music during road trips

In 2022, road trips remain among the most popular forms of travel in the post-pandemic world. Nearly 80 percent of travelers said they would take a road trip, which makes up approximately 206 million Americans. And listening to music is one of the top forms of entertainment people would do during a road trip.

problem

Back and forth for speaker control due to various music tastes

However, most of the time, only one person can connect their phone to the car and play their playlist. Accommodating the whole group's music taste has been a real challenge and requires a lot of effort:

Solution

Music Drop: One-click music sharing, controlling and collecting for everyone on the road trip

Take collaborative control over the speaker

Users could create a room, search for their nearby friends, and invite them to the room to get collaborative control over a shared queue.

Import music individually from various platforms

Users could import playlists from various existing music platforms, even from the recordings, to add their loved songs to a shared queue with a click.

Interact with friends and control songs collaboratively

While playing, users could collaboratively control the playing queue, collect songs into their own playlist and even react to the person who added the song.

Keep track of the good times after each trip

After the road trip, users still have access to previous queues, and they can even upload videos to generate a piece of music memory for each sharing session.

Result

Highest score in the expert review

Among the 56 teams, we got the highest review score and was highly praised by the judges as the "UX example that everyone should check out".

Check the results here.

Research

What's the break points in road trip music sharing?

Troublesome process of switching control over the speaker

To test out the current frustration of music sharing in road trip scenarios, we conducted a contextual inquiry to observe how people deal with the music sharing during a 30-min trip. We noticed that its hard for the controlling person to find the songs that others want to listen, so they spent 2/3 of the coordinating time on switching the connected devices.

Why do people need to switch devices?

Reliance on existing playlists to find the songs they want to listen

One thing that surprised us most was our testers could not even think of one song to play without checking the playlist. We also noticed that our participants frequently ask each other which song is being played and try to add it to their own playlist.

Project Goal

Create a smooth music sharing experience during road trip

Based on the identified pain points, we decided to design a product that can help users:

Search songs easily

Providing quick access to users' playlist from various platforms

Control songs easily

Shorten the steps of coordinting the songs users want to play

Collect songs easily

Help users keep track of the good songs and the good time

Design Challenge

How might we provide a seamless road trip music-sharing experience that satisfies everyone?

Ideation

feature Brainstorming

What if users could control the speaker at the same time?

In our previous contextual inquiry, the most troublesome process was everyone needs to gain control of the speaker in order to play the song they like. To find the product feature that could boost the process, we sought for inspirations from products that provide collaborative file management and edit.

narrow down to Key features

Prioritize functions with high impact and low cost

With all the ideas, we did a cost-benefit analysis to pick out the feasible features that are most critical to the music sharing experience.

User Flow

A "live room" where users can add, control and check songs in a playlist

Finally, we threaded the four main functions into user flows:

Prototyping

First version

Rapid prototyping from sketch to Hi-Fi within a week

Within one week, we delivered this first version of music drop for the contest. With a complete and smooth flow of inviting friends, importing music from all kinds of platforms (even recording), controlling and interacting with playing queue together and reviewing previous queues, we got the highest score in the first round of review.

Evaluation

Dramatic decrease of music sharing time cost

After finished the first prototype, we used "Wizard of OZ" to test the efficiency improvement. For the same task "Each of you play one song that you like", Music Drop reduced 75% of the time comparing to using existing products.

But there were still some small usability issues...

Iterations

Strengthen the concept of in-person music sharing

During the test, when we asked users "who do you think the people that are shown on the screen are?" they said this is an existing group, and these are the people that were previously added. Few of them realized that these should be the people that are physically around them.

To iterate, I enhanced the concept of a room by reducing unrelated items to emphasize the people in the room and naming the page with a room name.

Separate interpersonal interactions from music controls

During testing, we noticed that users are quite confused about the thumb-up icon and the heart icon. These two icons are both perceived as song collections while actually, the thumb-up icon is for interpersonal interaction.

In the iterated version, I separated these two kinds of interaction. Interpersonal interaction was moved right above the avatars which is easier to be connected with user, while song interactions stays at the bottom as most other music apps.

Add more feedback to increase trust & help understand

When we asked users where they think the song is added to, they found it hard to answer. I realized that we didn't provide enough feedback.

Therefore, in the iterated version, I also added a toast notification that reminds users where the song goes to.

Reflection

More research

Due to the time limitation, we didn't have enough time to explore all the possible scenarios of ad-hoc music sharing and dig deeper into a real road trip experience. I'm sure we can get more interesting insights if we have more time to talk to different kind of potential users.

Concrete technical solution

Also, we are not sure how exactly the technical solution would be for this idea. If we had the chance to discuss it with some developers, we might change some of the functions to make it more technically approachable. But we know definitely that the solution is feasible according to the competitive analysis.