Project Overview / Executive Summary
Our team created this project for our Interaction Design ll course for the Fall 2022 semester and Kennesaw State University. The goal for this project was to create a screen-based solution to a problem space of our choice that has yet to be created. Our team leader Tyler pitched an idea for an app that allows users to share music and playlist across different platforms which is something that I have wished for a while. With more research and debating our team decided to create a music streaming app that also allows users to send and receive music and playlist from users on many other platforms such as Apple Music and Spotify.
For this project, our class followed the Lean UX methodology which is based on developing a project using user research instead of searching for a solution in the beginning. We used information from the book Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams, 3rd Edition by J Gothelf & J Seiden.
My Contributions
For this project, our entire team focused on user research together, however, when prototyping we split assignments up evenly to keep the project running smoothly. My tasks were:
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logo
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For You page
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Playlist page
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"What's playing" screen
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Create a playlist pages
Team
Introduction
I am Quinn Smith, a senior at Kennesaw State University studying Interactive Design. This is a prototype idea that was pitched by Tyler Hayes (Team Lead). The goal of this prototype is to solve the problem of sharing music to all platforms such as Spotify, Apple Music, etc. When Tyler pitched this idea I instantly wanted to begin working on the idea since it is a problem I have had in the past many times. I knew that this app would provide a good challenge since there are already many streaming apps on the market, and making a new one that differentiated from the rest would not be easy. However, our collaboration with this project helped us to have plenty of time to come up with our final design.
Below you will see our Lean UX process to create our prototype. This process consists of two sprints that involve our research, stand-ups, design and interview sessions, and our prototype.
Sprint 1
Our project was broken up into two sprints to focus on the two half parts of our school semester. For the first sprint, we conducted our research and focused on our first set of user interviews. Below will be a more detailed explanation of the research process.
Week Zero:
The Lean UX Canvas was our starting point for design week zero. For this class, we followed the book Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams and according to the writers, Gothelf and Seiden, with the canvas, a team can declare what their assumptions are about a product, and determine its current state to its desired future (33-35). As a result of using this canvas, our team was able to build the foundation of assumptions for our product.
We first started off with "Brainstorm-dot-voting" to help us define our business problem and to come up with a new problem statement. For our personas, we discussed whom we wanted to target for our solution. We developed two different personas that had different personalities but both shared an interest in sharing music. Our primary persona "Alyx Good" is a college student who enjoys listening to music throughout the day and sharing music with her friends. Our secondary persona "Albi Cox" is a middle-aged individual that wants to discover new music by recommendation and wants to be able to easily create a playlist. Both personas have a shared goal of wanting to share music with their friends.
Once we completed our personas and formulated our hypotheses, we created our Minimum Viable Products (MVPs). These are the minimum work required to find out what's most important. To find out whether our riskiest assumptions will be true, we needed to come up with some potential design experiments. Because of this, we had to state what we would design and how we would test each hypothesis. Our team determined that by creating either a page or a widget that will allow users to quickly share a playlist they have created with other users who are on different streaming platforms, we could build a low-fidelity screen-based function with an airdrop/airplay function for users to test. We then could measure how valuable this is to them by asking them questions on how often they think they'd share music this way. If they don’t think it is a useful thing it will fail.
To end off the week we completed the product backlog, which narrowed down the focus and selected a few hypothesis statements from it. In selecting these, we considered the risk, the value, and whether or not we could create them within our deadline. Once we selected the feature we were focusing on for Sprint 1 this became our sprint backlog.
Week One:
For the start of our first week, our team started with our 2-Day Stand-Ups where we planned our week and discussed roles for each of the team members. This process helped us to stay organized and on track with the schedule that we were given.
Once we completed our 2-Day Stand-Ups we began conducting our user interviews. In these interviews, our team built a mini prototype that allowed the user to perform the possible function that would let them send a song to another user on a completely different streaming platform. Upon completion of this prototype, we then asked our users a series of questions that gave us feedback on our prototype, such as "How difficult was this function?" and "Would you use an app like this to share music?". We also asked our users what would they look for in an app that would allow them to share music with their friends who may not be on the same streaming platform as they are.
After completing our 3 interviews for the week we began Affinity Mapping to combine all the feedback from each of the interviews. Many of our users had things in common and gave feedback that aligned with each other. The only issue that many of our interviewees had was that they needed an explanation to understand how to use the feature. This feedback helped us move on to the next phase of our user prototype which had features that were implemented via the feedback we received.
Week Two:
During this portion of the sprint, we focused on our MVP which was the prototype that we were receiving feedback on from the interviewees. Some of these features included: building out a playlists page with sharable playlists, fixing up the receiving end of the airdrop, and deciding if we should keep the 3D touch or make it an obvious button. This week our team also completed a Retrospective, which are sessions that give the team time to reflect on completed tasks and highlight both successes and failures of the project.
With our retrospective, we found that our prototype idea was successful in allowing the users to transfer music from one streaming platform to another. However, the design of the prototype was basic and it did not function like it was its own app, more like a widget. We also found that it was necessary to implement a tutorial for the feature so that the users would understand how to share music.
After completing our interviews, 2-Day Stand-Ups, and retrospective we were ready to move ahead to sprint 2.
Sprint 2
Week One:
Once we began sprint two we looked back at our assumptions and pronto-personas to see if they were still true. Lucky for us everything remained true and we were able to move on to our third round of interviews along with working on our low-fidelity prototype adding in the “For You” page and making everything cohesive. Once we completed our three interviews we began on our affinity map to look for patterns that may be similar, different, or even outliers between the three interviewees. Once we finished our affinity map we realized that our prototype was missing a flow for users to create a playlist.
Prior to moving on to the next sprint, we gathered all the information we had from our interviews so we could begin working on our high-fidelity prototype. We found that we were going to create our app "Crosspop" which would be its own music streaming platform that would have a function that allows its users to share music with their peers on separate platforms. We decided to go this route instead of making a widget-like function since it would be the "best of both worlds", streaming and sharing music all in one.
Week Two:
Week two consisted of our team shifting from our low-fidelity prototype to a high-fidelity prototype that patched all the issues from the feedback we were given in the interviews. This includes finalizing text styles, color styles, branding, and interactions within each screen as well as the flow overall. We also had our final interview session which consisted of one returning participant from sprint one and two new participants. The feedback from these participants solidified our design decisions for our final prototype. Each participant said the app was easy to use and that they would personally use it in their day-to-day life. With this information, we updated our proto-persona one last time.
We saw a big jump from our first version of our proto-persona to our third version as our first version of "Alyx Good" was in need of a new music platform, and personalized playlists, and was likely to use/switch to another music platform. However, our third version not only changed to "Albi Good", but wanted to not change music services as they had specific ones because of a family plan, wanted simple features to share more often, and share in a more social environment. Another example that we learned from our participants is that most of them needed the incentive to share music cross-platform and want to share music with others cross-platform but typically just send a screenshot over text or send a youtube link.
For the remainder of week two, we worked on our final prototype to produce a high-fidelity version that met our proto- persona's needs.
Final Prototype
After a week-long break right after finishing up Sprint 2, Tyler took his time to organize and make a healthy file for the team to use to prototype, and with this came looking over every screen extensively to make sure everything was working correctly and updated correctly. Thus created Crosspop, a music media hub for listening to music, building playlists, having a “For You” page, and being able to share all of those elements to any music streaming platform you desire.
Conclusion
This project was a great introduction to the Lean UX process. We had a great team that worked together to learn this new process to create a wonderful project that could possibly come to fruition one day. I was able to receive a better understanding of user research and learn more about validating assumptions. I want to thank my team for always having great communication and for always listening to each other's opinions before making decisions. This project turned out very well because of our hard work and collaboration.
Key Takeaways
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Team communication and effort are vital to not have others burn out or stress more than they need to.
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Be careful to not ask leading questions, this may influence their answers and lead us down the wrong path.
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Don’t be afraid to voice your opinion. This could go for anything but specifically, if you disagree with a design decision, have an idea for how we should move forward, or even if you need help with your section of work.
