Moodify - Media App
Introduction:
The ‘freemium’ model has gotten extremely popular for media service companies nowadays like Youtube, Spotify, and Pandora. For this project, I was tasked with creating the touchpoints for upgrading a user’s account from a free account to a premium membership. In order to effectively create designs that would influence the user to upgrade to a premium account, I studied industry leaders’ approach to the freemium model and researched which features should be included as premium benefits and which features should remain free. Additionally, I conducted interviews with premium account users of those industry leading media companies mentioned above to learn about why they subscribe and which features are important for them in a media app.
For this project, I was given the scenario of a media company that launched 2 years ago following the freemium model. During the first two years, the main focus was to grow the free user base as much as possible, and now they are looking to evolve the feature set so they could monetize the premium features. Keeping this in mind, I was tasked with designing the experience that would allow users to subscribe and access premium features.
Problem Space:
As users of popular media services like Youtube and Spotify would know, you are able to use these apps as a free user, but with limited capabilities and you would be subjected to watching advertisements that occasionally interrupt your streaming/listening. In this ‘freemium’ model, users pay a monthly subscription fee in order to avoid watching/listening to advertisements, and also to gain access to additional features like offline listening and playing songs in your desired order rather than being stuck in shuffle mode. The main problem/goal of this project was to decide what premium features to put behind the subscription paywall, and which features needed to stay free in order to keep the free experience enjoyable. Additionally, after deciding on the free/premium features, I needed to decide where and how users would encounter the opportunity to learn about premium benefits and entice users to subscribe to generate revenue and profits.
The Solution:
Considering that there are already consolidated travel booking apps and websites available such as Expedia and Kayak, the travel booking platform space is already heavily saturated, so Points Friend will not be focusing on this space. Instead, Points Friend was positioned as a planning and research tool to assist travelers with the accumulation of their rewards points, and helping them maximize the redemption value of those points, so that they can travel more often and for longer periods of time.
My role:
This project was done solo and I was responsible for the entire design process. I conducted research on industry leading media companies, conducted interviews to learn about why users subscribed and which features were important to them, and created high/low fidelity prototypes which went through several rounds of testing and iteration. Throughout this process, I was sharing my progress with my mentor who is a UX/UI professional, and he gave me constructive feedback to improve my designs and helped me focus on creating the best user experience possible.
Key Phases:
Initial Research:
To understand the problem space better, I conducted research on Youtube, Spotify, and Pandora who are industry leaders in media service. Through this exercise, I was able to explore what I liked and disliked about each of these media platforms, and created action items that would be kept in mind when I eventually began designing the user experience for Moodify. Screenshots of this research are included below. Here is a link for better viewing.
After studying industry leaders, I continued my research by conducting interviews with premium users of those industry leaders. This allowed me to further my understanding of why users subscribe and what premium features were most important. From this, my main learnings were that users wanted to stream/listen ad-free, and they wanted to be able to listen to music offline and have content downloaded on their phone. Additionally, Spotify and Pandora do not let you pick the order of your music for free users, and that was another big reason why people chose to subscribe. Another popular reason to subscribe for Spotify users was group listening sessions in real-time.
Prototyping:
Given the scenario of an already existing app, after my research I went straight into designing. As part of the scenario, I was given lightweight wireframes to base my design off of. Screenshots of those are included below.
Given that the focus of this project was getting users to subscribe, I focused only on the subscription touchpoints of the app that I thought of. These touchpoints I decided to go with are:
Upon creation of a new account and signing in, an overlay would appear showing the benefits of subscribing and upgrading to a premium account.
If users decide to not subscribe right away, they can later go to their account settings and subscribe that way– opening the same subscription overlay that shows users the benefits of subscribing.
When users skip a song and listen to advertisement content, a text prompt near the media controls appears and provides access to
In order to visualize these touchpoints before actually designing, I created user flows. These user flows are seen below. Here is a link for better viewing quality.
After creating the users flows, it was time to actually design this and add to the lightweight wireframes I was provided with. Screenshots of my additions to the lightweight wireframes are included below.
First round of testing:
For moodify’s testing, I focused on the subscription touchpoints mentioned above. I conducted remote usability testing sessions with 5 users that currently have premium media application subscriptions. The first round of testing was successful, and all users were successfully able to navigate to find the subscription benefits overlay. The insights derived from this first round of testing were:
I then worked to improve the consistency for buttons and clickable elements, and also added another screen which properly displayed advertisement content for the high fidelity prototype.
High fidelity prototype:
Moving on, I then designed the high fidelity prototype. I added all final text copy, imagery, logos, icons, and colors, and finalized the font weight & size. For the high fidelity prototype, I learned how to integrate horizontal scrolling elements into figma and used horizontal scrolling for songs/albums and for the subscription benefits. Screenshots of the prototype are shown below, and here is a link to the interactive prototype for better viewing.
Second round of testing:
The second round of usability testing was also done remotely over Zoom, and with a new set of 5 participants. Upon receiving feedback from my mentor and from user interviews that the subscription benefits overlay was visually super interesting, I added some imagery to add visual appeal without taking away from the importance of the benefits overlay’s information about subscription features. Additionally, some users were having trouble finding the navigation menu within the media player screen, so I changed the menu icon to the familiar hamburger icon that users are more accustomed with, and I added navigation bar icons to make the user experience of Moodify match more closely with users’ other applications.
Reflection and Learnings:
Working on research and design for Moodify was a learning experience for me as I had to balance my attempts to get users to subscribe, while also not doing so invasively– or in a way that is too disruptive to the user experience. This was a great challenge and opportunity for me to think about this tradeoff, as I believe it is a tradeoff that is constantly discussed and iterated on within the product design/management professions. Optimizing conversion rates for subscriptions while also maintaining a good user experience for free users is definitely something that I will continue to see more and more as I start my career in UI/UX, and I am glad to have this experience now so that I can effectively contribute to future apps or websites that I work on.
Additionally, this project made me realize the importance of consistency, as users occasionally reminded me during testing that their other apps did things in a certain way that they expected would be consistent within Moodify as well. The usability tests for Moodify truly cemented the importance of testing and iteration for design, and the feedback of my mentor was an amazing help throughout the project as well.