Magroove
How do your discover new musics?
Set, 2020 - Launched

Android version
iOS version
Magroove - Startup
introduction
Magroove is a tool that allows you get know new music tracks helped by artificial inteligence. The company was founded in 2018 and this product aims to promote the music discovery and the opportunity for independent musicians show their talent. Within the app, the user can insert a music seed to get some track matches.​​​​​​​
product context
I joined into Magroove team in October, 2020 beeing the only designer in the hole company.  The main challenge was to develop the app interface in order to evolve the product it at all.
The product already had an user flow for music searching, use the music as a seed and get matches with new musics. Although the usability wasn't validated, and the PO couldn't know if the user was able complete the main goal that was simply "Find an awesome music". So we iterate and start back on the beginning phase to understand the user context.
With the statement in mind, I reached two questions for this new beggining:

1- Understand the comsumption and discovery of music in people routine.
2- Design scenarios in order to get the freedom for the user get discover new music tracks which wasn't listened before.
problem discovery
I consider the design proccess is a continuous proccess. Although a well succeed MVP can be the "end" of a sort of applied methods, I've suggest go back on the base of the problem.
Was necessary to go deeper to understand the target problem we would like to solve, I mean, to identify how the user interactions with the streaming market works, and classify the music searching in this tools. As of the research we've got the main insights.

.
In order to know precisely the problem, it was necessary to listen the users about their relationship with the music discovery. Therefore, I did a survey and used the same survey as a user screening to, after that, call the user for an interview.
Our sampling gather 124 people with a very diverse age profile, but consumes musics frequently and must adopt modern media like apps and digital store.
As of the analisys of the responses, I've noticed that there was highlighted groups using Weekly discovery on Spotify. There was a clear separation between users who use this feature and those who don't.
At the same time, even those of groups that use this feature, ther is a subgroup of users that are not satisfied with the music recommendation.
During interviews we found some behavior patterns:

1. Recurrent, but unsatisfied
We confirm that there is a relevant group of users who, even unsatisfied about the music recomendations, still using WD feature. The comfort of use a popular streaming app and the lack of informations about other sources to discover new music, make the users end up submitting to "ineffective" recommendations.

2. Personas and trends
During interview we noticed a interesting link about the user profile and behavior inside the streaming apps. We were able to sketch four differents behavior scale which link each other.

3. User in the control
The streaming app recommendations tend to be more em more personalized, our users reported a low control of the recommendations. The feeling reported during the interview was  about"Loosing the control".​​​​​​​
problem definition
By combining the data from these interviews with initial insights, we were able to come up with three personas that represent a gradient of behavior and demographic patterns of our target.
With well-defined personas, we now had a lens through which we could look at the problem. I learned from this process that defining a problem is sometimes harder than sitting down to solve it.
Our initial mission, which was very broad, could now be better expressed in sentences that the whole magroove team could agree on:

How might we design a product that make ther music discovery easier, enjoyable and dinamic?

The touch-points of this experience must be a visualization from the main persona actions when using the app. 
prototyping
​​​​​​​Starting with simpler, lower fidelity prototypes allowed us to trim the rough edges of the product overall concept, until we eventually hit a level of complexity in the tests that required a more high fidelity, versatile prototype.
This was of course not just the work of our design team but a coordinated effort with the technical team to support us not only in programming the prototype but also in user-testing it and iterating on the results.
Only after extensive discussion and brainstorming, we felt ready to start wireframes and pixel pushing: we tried dozens of versions of the UI of onboarding flows, empty states, artist profile, album profile, music players (OMG so many players), playlists, settings, etc. We allowed ourselves to go quite crazy in the beginning, bypassing many rules of our current design system, and then adjusted as we got closer to the final result.
To get details about this project you can contact me to talk about my design process!

douglasenoronha@gmail.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/douglasnoronha/
↑Back to Top