SOUNDLUXE RELAXATION APP
Meet your mood with music.
SoundLuxe stabilizes your heart rate by choosing a playlist with neutralizing BPM, based on your musical taste. Prepared playlists are activated when your wearable device detects irregular activity or the levels you alert the app to respond to.
GOAL
Design a mobile application that triggers music seamlessly within the application to stabilize the users' increased or lowered heart rate.
DESIGN PROCESS
Research
Research Plan
Participant Interviews
Research Debrief
Information Architecture
POV Statements
Crazy Eights
Storyboard
User Flows
User Interface Design
Low and Mid Fidelity Prototypes
High Fidelity Prototypes
Responsive Wireframes
Usability Testing
Remote Testing
In-Person Prototype Testing
Role
User Researcher
UI/UX Designer
Visual Designer
Product Designer
OVERVIEW
SoundLuxe's mission is to help people become more aware their anxiety levels during work, home, and commuting hours. The application can improve wellness awareness by adding a pleasurable, music response to users' changing heart rates, offering an effective, engaging option to daily stressors. The application triggers reminders, exercises, and creates a long-term, positive relationship between the user and music as a tool for self-awareness.
RESEARCH
The goal of the research was to understand how we can increase the number of users sharing music through the Spotify application and what the current experience of sharing music was like for users and how it can be improved. Secondary research was conducted based on direct and indirect competitiors like Pandora, Apple Music, Match.com and Dropbox. The sharing feature as well as the workarounds were researched along with participant interviews. The results from the interviews, research and surveys were used to inform us on understanding why users may not be sharing music and what can be done to encourage it. In the scenario, that users do share music, understanding what motivated them and implementing the features to increase the sharing of music on the spotify application and create an intuitive sharing experience.
RESEARCH PROCESS
The primary and secondary research led to creating a user persona, Natasha Lew, a 29 year old Director of Employee Experience living in Los Angeles, CA. Natasha really enjoys her field of work, though she is still new to her corporate position, and spends a lot of her spare time on personal projects. She uses SoundLuxe daily, as a reminder to take productive, self-calming breaks during her workday, which is integral for her lifestyle.
"There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating-people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing"
Oscar Wilde
The creation of Natasha Lew, led to a customer journey to understand what type of workarounds users come up with in using music to relax and to stabilize their mood. This customer journey map helped me understand the user’s motivation to listen to music during work hours, while commuting, and at home. It validated my initial assumption, that users are more likely to listen to music when it serves an intentional purpose than as a background filler.
.png)
The results from the customer journey map, research and surveys were used to inform me on how I can effectively incorporate elements into the mood stabilizing process, emotions and situations that prompt users to listen to music more, and how I can increase user awareness on the diverse uses music offers as a tool.
The biggest pain points discovered during the research stage was that the participants were worried about how often they needed to access the playlists for mood stabilization, being judged for their current emotional habits, as well as, most users were not aware of the wearable device trigger function..
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
Understanding how Natasha thinks and prioritizes the music listening, led to a few ideas by incorporating the Crazy Eight Ideation methodology to come up with rapid ideas, which led to Crazy Eights storyboarding. I was able to do low fidelity user testing to validate the user flow with the help of the storyboard. After the storyboard was mapped out, another user flow was created to depict how a user would be triggered to listen to music within the SoundLuxe application, as well as incorporating third party applications to share playlists when the user would like to share an experience with a friend.
USER INTERFACE DESIGN
Visual Design - Branding
At this point in the process, i began thinking about how the app would look and feel to users experiencing states of depression or elevated heart rates. I came up with a series of descriptive words that captured the essence of the
SoundLuxe brand:
Fresh, relaxing, natural, affordable
With these adjectives in mind, I created mood boards on Pinterest where I collected pins of typography, logos, and color schemes that aligned with my vision for SoundLuxe.
USABILITY TESTING
completed the required tasks at their homes on a android phone using the marvel app prototype. The participant’s interaction with the Web site/Web application was monitored by the facilitator seated in the same location.
The participants' responsibilities were to attempt to complete a set of representative task scenarios presented to them in as efficient and timely a manner as possible, and provide feedback regarding the usability and acceptability of the user interface.
The testing process led to a few revisions that informed and validated the design and features implemented on the prototypes.
SUMMARY
Most of the expectations and hypothesis were validated by the usability testing, and the implementation share functionality on the Spotify application was successful. A few suggestions were made by the participants, which included adding the share functionality at the top of the screen, so it would be less intrusive, as well as allowing the user to choose what music listening habits they want to advertise. Adding a feature to an already existing successful application proved to be challenging and thought provoking. There are a number of different sharing functionalities can be added to the feature, such as letting users make groups of friends that they share music with the most, or even gamifying the sharing experience by adding points everytime a song is shared. There is a lot of potential for adding more functionality to the sharing feature, and is something we are excited to explore further.