PRODUCT DESIGN • HACKATHON • PROTOTYPING • AMAZON MUSIC
AMAZON ROOM
Amazon Music and Pratt Institute held a joint hackathon during February 2024. My team and I worked on the prompt to unleash a new social feature to promote new music, artists and interact with one another, with the potential to bring in new revenue for Amazon Music.
My Role
UX Research: Designed survey and promoted it, conducted competitive audit, user interviews and analyzed the data.
UX Design: Created wireframes, ideated on design solutions and created hi-fi prototypes with interaction.
2 Product Designers + Me
Team
Tools
Figma, FigJam, Miro, Zoom, G-Suite
Overview
We wanted to understand customers’ music streaming experience and how we could include AI into making their experience better.
4 weeks
Duration
Challenge
Imagine how Amazon Music can use AI to enhance its user experience.
Solution
A TL;DR version of our feature. Amazon Room is a socialization booster for Amazon Music.
Our Approach
We followed a highly iterative approach; we made sure to iterate and conduct further research to make sure our decisions were sound.
Generative Research
We wanted to learn about people’s music streaming habits and their overall attitude toward AI and Amazon Music.
We conducted surveys, user interviews and competitor audit.
Surveys
We conducted surveys to understand the music streaming habits of customers, the platforms they use frequently, what they are dissatisfied with when streaming music and how they would like to improve their music streaming experience.
We posted our surveys on many platforms such as Discord, Reddit and WhatsApp. 86 music lovers responded.
Interviews with Users
We conducted interviews with 15 customers to understand their problems and define any opportunities for Amazon Music to improve satisfaction and gain a considerable edge over other platforms in the market.
We gathered 3 main insights:
Competitor Audit
Analysis
Audit
To understand how different competitors are unique and foster social interaction within their platforms, we decided to conduct a competitor audit.
We looked into three main themes when doing the audit:
We conducted a detailed analysis of existing competitors that socialized the music-streaming experience.
We later compared Amazon Music to these competitors to understand where it lacked, what it did better and what could be introduced to make it stand out in the highly competitive market.
Meet Amy Echo
Meet Amy, a loyal Amazon Music customer. Like many others her age, she is tech-savvy and is always thinking about interacting with people through things she enjoys, music being one such thing!
Key Features
Business Model
How does it work?
By addressing the identified problems and leveraging insights from our research, we deduced that implementing an enhanced recommendation algorithm with a human touch would significantly improve the music streaming experience for our customers, driving greater satisfaction and loyalty to the platform.
Additionally, our ideas on "group listening" and profile features would further enhance user engagement by fostering community connections and providing personalized music experiences tailored to each individual's preferences and interests.
Iterative Design
Now, we only had 3 weeks remaining, so I along with my teammates started creating lo-fi wireframes to visualize the functioning of Amazon Room.
We created several lo-fi options of various proposed functions. We made sure to discuss these in our meetings and furthered the ideas with mid-fi prototypes.
Mid-Fidelity Stage
The mid-fi prototype aimed to help us visualize how the final product would turn out. We referenced Amazon Music’s visual design and style guide provided to us by the Amazon team.
I specifically made sure to create design tokens referenced from the original Amazon Music style guides to make the final prototyping work easier and faster.
Final Hi-Fi Prototype
Through thorough discussions and mentor feedback, we finally started work on Hi-Fi prototypes. I also worked on animations and interaction patterns when the customer uses the feature for the first time, that is, onboarding. We also made changes to some interactions.
Try the prototype here!
Press Z to zoom out and see entire screen.
Press R to restart the prototype
Reflections
I wish I had a picture to commemorate this collaboration. I am and will always be grateful to my mentor, Anthony Conta. This is my second project under his mentorship and he is, and will always be, fantastic!