Neurobiologist-turned designer driven by sense-making, systems thinking, and storytelling. Seeking full-time interaction, experience, or product design roles.
Work spans the digital and physical, including functional user interfaces, immersive experiences, research, and creative strategy.
Product Design
UX Research
Mobile App Design
Spring 2020 (Feb - May 2020)
Figma
Notion
Pen + Paper
A 10-week project investigating solutions to unaddressed user needs in a popular mobile app. I chose Spotify for three main reasons:
Through user research, collaborative brainstorming, and prototyping, I gathered research insights to expand functionality and user delight.
Liked Songs integration
Easily access present and past favorites with flatter visible navigation.
Timeline
Look back at new discoveries and last month's favorites with a simple swipe.
Lifetime
Transport back with a cumulative view of your listening trends across the years.
I initially expected listeners to have the most hang-ups over music sharing and social activity features. After surveying users, it quickly became clear that people were not so concerned about what others were listening to. Rather, an interest in improving personal taste development and music curation surfaced.
A general survey of 14 users revealed existing behaviors and key features–
I conducted contextual inquiries and a series of user observation sessions with 5 participants. Spotify does a great job with discovery options, and users were ambivalent towards social sharing features.
With insights derived from contextual inquiry, I redefined the people problem:
As a music lover, I want to look back at the music I've progressed through and enjoyed, while exploring new finds and accessing the constant favorites I love.
I enlisted 7 participants with diverse listening tastes and habits. Through participatory brainstorming, we identified three promising solution spaces that needed some TLC —
After feasibility/impact evaluation, I decided on Feature 1 to develop further– a chronological organization feature to clean up Liked Songs and provide new functionality. This solution services the broadest user scenarios while building upon a solid existing infrastructure. Timeline allows users to efficiently access recent discoveries, while providing the built-in framework to make revisiting old favorites delightful and intuitive.
I wanted to introduce an option that was intuitive and efficient. I presented a series of preliminary iterations to 5 users for A/B testing, exploring three key considerations:
Touch-state node labels were included in all future versions to improve feedback for monthly quick-scrolling.
Users were confused about the function of the play icon (“I thought it was an arrow pointing later in the year”). It was not immediately clear that each year within the feature can be shuffled.
The flexibility to use Timeline as a monthly, annual, or cumulative recap playlist resulted in various shuffle and play options.
“Liked songs doesn’t have any utility currently- I never use it because it’s a mess and I’d rather just make a playlist of all the music I listen to each month.”
“Right now I’m super selective with what songs I like because there’s no organization within Liked Songs. I wish I could just shuffle play a portion of it instead of the whole thing…I don’t want a song I liked from 3 years ago to pop up randomly, but I also don’t want to unlike it and lose it forever.”
“It would be really easy to create seasonal playlists now, which I tend to do a lot.”
“I’d use the hell out of this. That way I can stop making playlists each month and just go to the timeline.”
Listeners want a contextualized history of their musical journey. By providing users with a meaningful record of past discoveries, the Timeline feature also shapes and informs future exploration. This feature seeks to provide a simple solution in alignment with existing user practices, and aims to address latent needs.
My first experience conducting generative user research and iterating solutions has reinforced the importance of unbiased, open-ended inquiry. The discrepancies between my original hypotheses and actual users' desires revealed the need to validate assumptions and examine driving behaviors early in the design process, and how qualitative and qualtitative measures support each other.
This project solidified the notion that design isn't about flashy aesthetics or fancy features, but is first and foremost a means of problem-solving. What seems like such a simple design, when aligned with latent user needs, has potential to create lasting engagement and memorable impact.
With streaming, music has become increasingly accessible, allowing for continued exploration, connection, and community. This project was born out of a desire to help listeners and contribute to a beloved product that is used by millions daily.
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This was a case study for the Spring 2020 Digital Product Design course at Cornell University.
Ann Li 2020
