UX CASE STUDY
Sonus is a platform designed to promote music sharing through an interactive visual display of you and your friends’ listening habits. This project was created over the course of a semester during my junior year as a group project.
Research & Discovery
The original ideation questions were focused on interface design and artist discovery.
During our first meeting, we got to know each other by collaborating on expanding the HMWs in as many directions as possible. After refining the HMW options, we began to plan our interview questions for the next step. Defining the design challenge further required additional research which my team conducted in the form of interviews and market research.
Market research
Discovery interviews
We interviewed artists to understand their music distribution process and what kind of recognition they valued. Additionally, we interviewed both active and passive music listeners to understand where and how people were looking for new music. I interviewed two colleagues of mine to get a better idea of how they listen to and discover music, creating somewhat of a user journey in my head to figure out the low points and delve deeper into them.
Interview insights from Mural
Synthesize & Define
After gathering insight from our market research and background interviews, we worked on narrowing down our design challenge to sharpen our approach to this project.
Design Challenge
How can we foster a more personal, active, and visually compelling music discovery experience that urges users to explore music outside their comfort zone?
User Personas
Rina
Active music listener
Loves discovering new artists
Explores diverse genres
Steve
Passive music listener
Has difficulty connecting to artists
Stuck in his own music bubble
Ideation & Development
During the Ideation and Development phase, my team worked through multiple iterations of our idea. Even after the initial synthesis of our findings, we found that we kept going back to our research to further develop components of the project that came up. After developing and redeveloping multiple times, we finalized our surface prototype.
Half of the team would work on developing the low and high-fidelity prototypes while the other half was actively conducting usability testing.
Early ideas
User Flows
Reflection
Working with amazing people
This was the very first "big" UX Design project I worked on in college, it's become one of my fondest memories! the most memorable part of this project was the teamwork. I'm incredibly thankful for the group I had, we were all genuinely interested in brining something new to the process of music sharing.
After graduating, someone actually shared an I Phone widget with me called "AirBuds" that had a lot in common with Sonus. It was amazing to see something we had worked on coming to life in someone else's product. I definitley regret not trying to build this student project out fully with my peers.