Overview​​​​​​​

CheckIt is a mobile app concept with a mission to bring people closer through the magic of music. CheckIt's platform allows others to share their favorite tunes with friends and plan for concerts/festivals with ease.

Since childhood, I’ve had an affinity for music. It all started with my dad sharing his favorite Beatles and Cat Stevens songs with me. From there, my giddy, 10-year-old self would burn music to CDs and give them to my friends - simply because I wanted them to discover the songs that made me happy, too. These days, you can still catch my friends and I serving out our favorite beats with one another.

My friends and I adore sharing and discussing our favorite songs through iMessage. However, it can be a bit frustrating to go back and scroll to find the songs we wanted to listen to amidst the piles of texts. Knowing that some amazing songs were being put on the back burner, I wanted to figure out if sharing on a different platform would make a difference.

Identify ways to enhance others’ experiences of sharing music and attending festivals/concerts, and learn what would create an engaging social space for music lovers.

Through user-centered design, I sought to create a space that encourages sharing and discussing music.

I wanted to incorporate a feature for concert/festival-goers to connect and plan for their next event, as I believe live music experiences are something worth sharing together as well. 

For event-goers, I wanted to explore how I could design a platform that permitted ease in coordinating groups and forming meeting spots.

Interviewees chose Spotify as their favorite music app because of how simple and organized it is. They also enjoy how personal the app feels due to daily curated playlists. For example, one interviewee specifically loved that he could add his own cover photo to fit the aesthetic of the playlist he created. With this feedback, I learned that a small touch of personalization goes a long way, and users value simplicity in interface.

When asked the question, “What inspires you to share music?”, all three interviewees answered friendship. Whether they are driving together and someone is in charge of the aux cord, or they are apart and text their friend a song they might like, interviewees find a sense of excitement and connection in sharing a song with the people they care about. Listening to them speak about how music has impacted their friendships validated that social aspects of the app will be valuable for users.​​​​​​​

Pain points in sharing music include not knowing whether their friends will like the songs they play when they’re together.​​​​​​​

When sharing songs through text, users don’t like the hassle of layers to get to the song; they would rather the text send them straight to the song or app without taking them to the mobile browser and then playing the song from there.

With this feedback, I wanted to focus on ways of encouraging users to share songs with confidence, as well eliminating digital barriers that prevent others from listening to what their friends share.

Two interviewees felt disappointment when they’ve received notifications of artists that are playing in their state, but aren’t close enough to their local area. 

With this, I wanted my app to be a place where users will only be notified when an artist is coming to the specific locations that they set.

Interviewees suggested features that displayed parking information, easy access to tickets, a place to note meeting spots and times, and a geolocation to track friends when messaging doesn’t work.

Keeping other music lovers at the heart of my design was my goal throughout this entire project. In order to remain others-focused, I created two personas and empathy maps based on the three individuals interviewed. Shane the Sharing Aficionado and Emily the Event Enthusiast served as humble reminders of the people I’m designing for.

Using Lean UX principles and prior research, I created a list of minimum viable products and user stories. These tools allowed me to focus on what users wanted and why, so that I can create something testable, usable, and lovable for them moving forward.

The open card sort for my music app design was created through OptimalSort, an online card sorting tool. Three participants from the Springboard UX community completed the card sort. I referenced my user stories in order to prepare 24 cards that participants could organize to their liking.

Participants came up with similar to identical category names when organizing the cards. Words such as "Music", "Events", and "Profile" were commonly used to name categories, and each of these categories had very similar tasks grouped within them.

Below is a similarity matrix that displays participants' pair combinations that were grouped together the most often.

With an idea of what users would find intuitive in layout, I sketched a sitemap to present category hierarchy. Once I had a basic layout, I headed over to Google Drawings to create a cleaner map.

I used Google Draw to create user flows, which helped me to gain insight into what users can achieve with CheckIt.

I took my high fidelity wireframes and added images, copy, and icons to replace blank boxes, then brought them over to InVision.

There, I created an interactive prototype, which gave me a sense of the design's flow. Seeing design ideas come to life was fun, exciting, and eye-opening to all that I could improve in my design.

Below is a rough prototype I created to look at design flow.

I put together a style guide, so that UI design would be consistent throughout, as well as create a warm and friendly digital atmosphere for users. 

This style guide was incorporated in the secondary prototype during usability testing.

I recruited three individuals to test out CheckIt's design, in which each user performed the same four tasks using an interactive prototype. Two tests were performed in person at coffee shops, and one test was performed remotely. Each participant was in their mid-twenties and used music apps on a regular basis.

Task Analysis 

This task was performed quickly and with little hesitation. Two users tapped on profile pics on their feed to view friends' libraries and recent posts. One user's immediate reaction was to view a friend's profile using the search icon on the home page.

Users enjoyed the ability to personalize their profiles and browse their friend’s libraries.

Participants found this task to be intuitive and hassle free.

One participant suggested replacing a page that required tapping an "X" icon to leave the page with a disappearing box after sharing the song. I loved this idea and incorporated it into my design.

This task was the most confusing for participants because of wording and information hierarchy. 

For example, two participants suggested that "Venue" and "Parking" could be in one place together, rather than having to tap on each of them separately to view them. 

The word "Set times" was also confusing, as participants were used to seeing "Lineup" when looking for information on festival performers.

Thanks to user feedback, I made sure to go back and organize information in way that is easier for users to navigate through intuitively. 

Below is an interactive prototype that incorporates feedback from usability testing. 

The most impactful lesson I've learned throughout designing CheckIt is that it's the stories of others, and learning from those stories, that cultivate something helpful and sincere.

Listening to others speak about their relationship with music and how it's strengthened their friendships was a driving factor in my design. Through learning common struggles among users, I wanted to come up with solutions that motivate them to keep sharing and connecting. Most of those solutions are found in the smallest of details, such as adding a cover photo, browsing through a friend's music library, or commenting on a post to express something meaningful. 

As I continue to design, I want to remind myself not to overlook the little things that get people excited to use a product. People are amazing in that there is so much we can learn from one another, and I’m glad that UX is a field that recognizes that.