Smart playlist
When users create a playlist they sometimes only want to give basic properties and expectations and let the app do the rest.
Year
2021-2022
My role
Product Designer
Company
SoundCloud
Often people listen to music on the go or as a background for a certain activity and not everyone has time for careful track selection for a new playlist for the next morning run or commute. By running user research at SoundCloud, we learned that users would appreciate assistance with finding relevant content among a large amount of underground music and would love to have more customization in the product.
01
Summary
In total, we conducted 7 user interviews where presented the Smart playlist prototypes to participants. All users easily understood the concept of the feature, and the idea of having a faster way to get a playlist of their favorite music was very attractive to SoundCloud users. They found it to be an easy and convenient way of getting favorite or recommended music and liked the sense of customization. The Smart playlist was perceived as the favorite feature during all user testing sessions.
02
User research
We introduced two high-fidelity prototypes of the Smart playlist feature with different layouts to users. The second version with 3 steps was the preferred experience by the majority of participants as it is more visually appealing, and has larger imagery and animated elements. Though users found the first "one-pager" version to be a bit more straightforward in terms of understanding the concept faster.
The Smart playlist is a playlist generator based on the kind of music users love or they in the mood for. The tool is a nice way to engage listeners with a mix of algorithmic recommendations and customization. With the Smart playlist, users can create playlists based on their tastes and personal recommendations in just 10 seconds.
03
Solution
To create a Smart playlist users only need to choose what kind of content they want to add to the playlist among liked & listened tracks, a mix of known & new music, or recommendations based on the user’s personal taste. The next step is to select a genre and adjust the length of the playlist.
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