To figure out how to improve Soundhound so that it can be a major player in the music streaming market.

We conducted user interviews with a sample size of 4 people. We asked them a series of questions about their tastes in music, which apps they frequent, and what they wish could be improved about the modern day music experience, among others.

Having had the interviews recorded and dictated thanks to audio services from websites like otter.ai, we were able to pull from the dictations the highlights of the interviews and place them on a digital springboard on the program Figjam. We put down each of our answers for the interview questions on a template before we took the answers and put them on digital sticky notes for Affinity Mapping.

With our answers put onto numerous digital sticky notes, we went to a corkboard template in Figjam and together we sorted our sticky notes into groups, which were “Favorite Music Apps”, “Likes”, “Dislikes and Improvements”, “How They Share”, and “How They Discover New Music”. We did this to find patterns in the way users think and feel about the experience.

There were numerous key themes and patterns we found from these interviews: 

• Users wanted Suggested Songs/Playlist options, Autoplay, the ability to discover new songs and artists, the ability to create playlists, and the ability to connect with friends over music streaming platforms. 

• Users disliked how ads interrupt their music, how artists typically get underpaid through streaming services and the lack of options in connecting with friends, and felt that Soundhound’s interfaces and offline usage could be improved. 

• User’s typically share music via word of mouth, social media, in-person or at events.

• Users expressed dissatisfaction with the fact that users can really only share music if they’re on similar platforms. People on Spotify can’t follow their friends on Apple Music, people who don’t want Facebook or Twitter can’t see content exclusive to those platforms, etc. If the apps are compatible, one still has to go from one app to another just to share one single song. 

• Finding new music without friends typically happens naturally through daily life or interacting other forms of media, such as TV or movies, or suggested songs from their music platforms.

• When they discover a new song but don’t know the title or artist, they use the listening feature on Shazam, Soundhound’s biggest and more popular competitor, which has almost all of Soundhound’s features and more.  

To better understand how users think and feel, we used our observations and takeaways to create a persona.

Her name is Olivia Bell, a 32-year-old Managing Director from Orlando Florida. She loves listening to music but doesn’t always know the name of songs that come on throughout the day.

Her and her friends love sharing and discovering new music with each other. Her needs/goals are to get more accurate suggestions for discovering new music and to share it with friends without leaving the app or needing to use a different one.

Her two biggest frustrations are sharing music on social media and having to leave an app in order to accomplish a task.

We made a Journey Map to track the thoughts, feelings, and experiences that Olivia has when she wants to identify a song, share it with friends, and add it to her favorites on Soundhound.

Soundhound’s ability to identify a song in under 20-seconds was a pleasant surprise.

Wanting to find more songs similar to the one she just identified, she becomes disappointed when Soundhound doesn’t show suggestions. She’s only limited to the songs she searches for.

When she wants to share the song with a friend, Soundhound asks her to do so in a different app like Facebook or Spotify.

Soundhound’s basic function of discovering a new song continues to be its best feature, but requires much more to become a better app. For all these reasons, we considered adding social media components to Soundhound.

Various tools were used to implement our research into the design phase. First we did a Competitive and Comparative Analysis to see the advantages and disadvantages the competition had over Soundhound, as well as gain insight on the functions of other non-competitive apps to see if any of them would work for Soundhound.

We also developed a User Flow to help us map out how we’d like to solve our two biggest tasks for Soundhound, which would be sharing a new song, and adding it to the favorites list.