AMAZON MUSIC: MUDIARY

Amazon Music Design Challenge: Design the future of music.

ROLE:
Concept development, user research, visual design

TIME:
4 weeks (Feb 2023)

TEAM:
Amanda Yee, Carolyn Yu

The demands of everyday life can leave us feeling disconnected from ourselves and our passions. The worst part? It’s so normalized that we often don’t even realize that it’s happening. But what if there was a way to reconnect with that lost part of yourself?
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For many, the nostalgia that music creates can serve as a powerful reminder of one's true self - it can transport people back to specific moments in their lives and rekindle long-forgotten memories that allow them to rediscover their identity.  We believe that by tapping into this powerful emotional response, we can offer a new music listening experience that allow users to revisit their favorite songs in a fresh and compelling way.

USER RESEARCH


Before designing, we sent out a survey to get a better idea about people’s listening habits and got 87 respondents from around the world. We noticed a trend that music evokes memories of their own personal experiences and story.

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To dig deeper, we interviewed 6 participants and discovered that music is more than just entertainment, but also a means of self-expression and communication. This inspired our concept and we focused our brainstorming session on 3 key areas:

However, given the speculative and futuristic nature of our concept, we must make the following assumptions:

360 degree cameras will be a built-in function in phones.

Wearable technologies will be more common.

With these devices, we can use your heartbeat to detect and analyze your emotions in real-time.

AI emotionally intelligent features:

As AI advances, it can comprehend photo and calendar context (e.g. who, when, where) and connect your listening habits and emotions with specific songs and memories by tracking your heartbeat.

SKETCHES


Working under these assumptions, I wanted to consider all design aspects of the app along with the user flow of...

01   My Emotion Map
02   My Memory Collection

VISUAL DESIGN

MY EMOTION MAP


I used bars because they provide a clear and intuitive representation of data that is easy to read and understand. The length of each bar corresponds to the time spent listening to music, while its position indicates the user’s mood. I included daily, monthly, 6-month, and yearly graphs, allowing users to visualize correlations and long-term trends.

MY LIVE EMOTION


To capture the dynamic and constantly shifting nature of emotions, I used an animated blob to visualize the user's current mood. We selected the colors for our design based on color psychology to represent different emotional states. These colors were chosen from Amazon Music's design system.

MY MEMORY COLLECTION


Users can select a memory to relive by memory, date, or location, providing them with greater flexibility and control over their experience. I opted for a gallery calendar, as it aligns with users' mental models, minimizes scrolling, and offers a visual search experience.

USABILITY TESTING

To test the effectiveness of our concept, we asked 5 participants to complete a series of tasks. Fortunately, we got a lot of positive feedback and implemented their suggestions in our next wave of iterations!

USER TEST UPDATE

VISIBILITY


We moved the VR icon to a more visible location to give it the same level of importance as the play button. To make it more clear these playlists are generated for the user, we used AI-generated images for the playlist covers.

USER TEST UPDATE

DATA VIEWS


We color-coded the bars and included a key to make it easier for users to quickly understand the data and track their emotions over time. We also recognized that people enjoy learning more about themselves, so we also made it a priority to provide more music-related data to keep users interested in using the platform regularly.

USER TEST UPDATE

DROPDOWN & TOOL TIP


To promote the accuracy and reliability of our emotion detection, we hid the sliders under a dropdown menu. We also added a pop-up that will appear for first time users explaining what this page is and how it works.

FINAL DESIGN

Try our Prototype!

FEEDBACK

We showcased our concept and design to the product designers of Amazon Music, as well as the VP of Design and Creative. The presentation was live-streamed to an audience of over 4000, comprising of the entire Amazon Music team. We ranked in the top 3 among over 60 teams and received a lot of positive feedback:
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“I love the abstract listening experience and the idea of being able to hear everything surrounding you.”

“I like recording things - some special moments that I want to record [...] The share feature is good and that I’ll use it a lot - I like how playful and pretty it is [so] it’s something I’d want to put on my Instagram story.”

LEARNINGS

Embracing ambiguity — "Design the future of music" is a broad and open-ended topic, so I initially had no idea where to even begin. But by reframing ambiguity as an opportunity rather than a hinderance, I was able to tackle the challenge with a creative and open mind, resulting in innovative solutions and fresh perspectives.

Using a system — At first, designing within Amazon Music's design system felt limiting, but I realized the importance of maintaining a consistent user experience and staying on brand. I learned to be flexible and incorporate the design system into my workflow, which allowed me to effectively create designs that aligned with the brand's identity.

Awww, looks like that's the end.

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