A UI/UX Case Study on Fizy

For this case study, I will be focusing on the music streaming platform — Fizy.

This case study was completed as a ‘6 hours standalone project’. I was challenged to create a new concept and a better user experience for a part of an already existing mobile application called Fizy. Accordingly, some users are experiencing some difficulties, especially when creating new lists and discovering new content. That’s why I tried to design a better experience and a visual concept for the ‘My Music — Müziğim’ page.

My Goals

• Music app targets to easily work with own playlists and playlists provided by the other music lovers. That includes: own playlist creation, storage, search functionality;
• Provide clever search;
• Users can search for and listen to any songs, artist, album quickly.
• Provide visibility for music lovers by possibility to share their playlists with people all over the world.
• Create an engaging and well designed UI which would be based on research and information of application and target audience.

Approach

I used a design thinking approach for all these steps.

Empathy

Objectives

• Describe how users find themselves in a situation when they don’t have an idea what to listening.
• Describe how they learn to make playlists if they don’t know the app.
• Describe how they solve to find songs they like. What approaches do they use?

Target
Interviews were made with a user with different music taste, different familiarity with technologies and who listen music occasional. I asked the participant how often they found themselves in this similar situation and how she figured out what to listen.

I did this interview only with 1 user, because of time limitations of the project.

Research
To clearly understand why users need this function, I must know what the users’ goals look like and how they reach them. It is necessary to observe and ask what goals they are trying to achieve and how they will do it.

UX design cannot be done without the users and without talking to them. Before starting the interview on this subject, I determine the goals, target audience and questions.

Research — User Interview
During of interview with the user I used open questions covering a variety of music related topics (concerts, YouTube, Spotify, shopping) before deep diving into the most relevant areas to gain actionable insight.

I asked to her some questions like:

• Do you listen to music a lot?
• What kind of things do you search for in music? Why?

…

As I went about the interviewing process I asked several open ended questions to her such as:

• When was the last time you used a digital service for listening music?
• What was the result? Why?
• How/why does your current digital music service meet your needs?

Research — Usability Test
Usability testing is an efficient method that is employed to determine the weaknesses of an application through volunteers who are asked to use the application to complete certain tasks given by the moderator.

In this project, usability test was conducted with 1 user (Ayşe). The participant was asked to use the application and create the necessary playlist for his favorite music by thinking aloud. All I did was take notes and record while observing user’s behavior and listening to her feedback throughout the process.

Netnography
Apart from the interview and test, I inspected the users’ feedback about the application via App Store and Google Play reviews to find out what ideas Fizy users have to improve their own experiences for ‘My Music’ page.

Define

After the research, I started putting together all the information on sticky notes to create an affinity map.

I used a matching method to find and group patterns in my observations. It helped me get interesting information about my target users.

Experience Map
Expanding upon findings, I mapped out a typical journey with the associated emotions from the moment when users first begin searching musics through to listening in the app.

I analyzed the research results. My findings:

• There are some main ways to decide what to listen: use well-known playlists, search for them online.
• User is interested in a relevant search, a huge database of interesting musics and their audit.
• Most of the data points were related to find new music and playlists.
• People find a lot of new music on Youtube.
• Songs on a playlist should have a similar sound.
• People value finding new music or artists that are aligned with their preferences.

Also the process ended with positive emotions in creating and add playlist, but was hampered by two pain points:

• Finding some music is not in a smart way.
• It is highly disappointing to sometimes not find and filter the right genres, musics and singers/groups.

From this I created the problem statement:

“Users want a way to curate songs with similar sounds in their playlists and find new songs aligned with their music taste. Fizy’s recommendations don’t align with user’s playlist vision.”

Ideate

The common way to decide what to listen is to search for musics and then create a playlist to add them at My Music page.

My idea was to combine this method with a reversing method: start by choosing the songs, genres, etc. you love and then get the relevant songs and singers/groups.

Based on my observations and insights, I have created a list of features that can help users with their needs.

I asked my participant to prioritize these features based on frequency and importance of use. I’ve included the results in a table by frequency of use. The results helped me determine which features are most important to user(s).

After all, I have 3 main functions that are very important for users:

• Base recommendations on the songs that user adds to playlist.
• Allow user to choose criteria (genre, etc.).
• Find similar songs based on sound.

Features like ‘search for playlists’ were in the last place. It was a great example of how important it is to explore rather than assume the needs of real users.

Information Architecture
The way the content is organized is as important as the content itself. The basic user flow is very simple; You start by searching for songs or genres, and then you get a list of songs to choose the best one for you.

Prototype

I created some lo-fi wireframes on paper before to prototype and test my design ideas with users.

UI
I started working on the visual part of this app. I put in all my findings and ideas to create a light and clean user interface that will not distract users from their goals.

UI — ‘My Music’ Page
This page provides the user with a clear direction on where to start. The most popular titles guide the user and give them assumptions.

I moved all categories here which have their own pages so user should click on category and page will open.

So i decided to design screen for Recently Played category. It divides into 3 parts: Song, Video, Playlist.

User can slide right with finger to see more songs/videos/lists which has been watched before.

UI — Search Functionality
On the top section, user can type in some keywords to find song, artist or playlist.

Also under search bar there are some categories. User can choose what he/she is looking for (song, artist or others).

By default, the selected category is Popular, so the system searches for the most popular / highest rated songs at the moment.

When specific song is playing, on its image appears pause icon so users can stop this song. When user clicks on 3 dots (right side of every song) appears menu for options (share, etc.). On player; user can pause the song, switch to next and previous song.

By default, the selected category is Popular, so the system searches for the most popular / highest rated songs at the moment.

When specific song is playing, on its image appears pause icon so users can stop this song. When user clicks on 3 dots (right side of every song) appears menu for options (share, etc.). On player; user can pause the song, switch to next and previous song.

I moved these categories up. I think it will be easier for users to find what they want. Users can select specific category for search results and suggestions.

For example: ‘eurovision’

So it gives opportunity to type in keywords and search by songs or by artists or by genre which is important for our users.

UI — Create Playlist
The process begins by going to the library and pressing “create playlist” and giving it a name.

After pressing ‘Add Songs’, users go directly to the liked songs page and would be prompted to choose as many songs as they would like to start the playlist.

It has become more useful because it allows users to select multiple songs at the same time and can use categories.

Users will be able to find similar songs more easily depending on their preferences now.

Test & Next Steps

After creating the mockup and prototype, I will run a user test to validate my ideas. I will give some task to participants.

I’ll prioritize my findings according to their importance and identified the most important problems I needed to solve. After that, I’ll revise the prototype and user interface.

If I had additional time, the project would be finalized and tested about usability with more users to get some more insights.

I am not the user even if I use the app! Although I am a loyal Spotify user, it’s a universal UX principal to always keep the users at the center of the design.

Let me know if you have any thoughts or comments! Feel free to connect with me on Linkedin as well. Also if you want to listen to my ‘hand-picked’ playlist, here’s my Spotify.

Thank you for your interest!