ABOUT

As the world’s leading social sound platform where people can create and share sounds, SoundCloud wants to expand the way users interactively share music.

SoundCloud provides a place for musicians to record, upload, promote and share their sounds for listeners to access around the world. SoundCloud users are able to “like” artist tracks, follow artists, create playlists, and join groups to support and grow the SoundCloud community. Although users are able to curate their own playlists from songs they select, SoundCloud would like to create a feature that allows users to collaborate online, DJ’ing their select tracks with other users in real time.

DISCOVER
This brief gave us lots of scope to explore who our DJs might be and how they may want to collaborate online. The hypothesis we first wanted to test with user research was to validate whether a basic feature that would enable all users of Soundcloud to collaborate by taking turns playing tracks to each other and in doing so would produce a collaborative set. Since the objective marker we set for success would be measured with collaborative sets being created and an increase in tracks being liked.

DJ’s told us that, if Soundcloud could recreate the fun and challenge they find in collaborating offline they would be very interested in using using the feature. However, DJ’s were not excited by the idea of a basic feature, which only allowed them to play tracks without any mixing required. We came to understand that if there feature wasn't fun and technical they wouldn’t use it.

DEFINE
Experience mapping, user stories and user flows helped to understand the behaviours, attitudes, and pain points of our personas. Breaking down the user journey into tasks helped us to understand the essential features we would need to provide to meet our DJ’s needs. With progressive enhancement in mind, we wanted to deliver the most simplest prototype in our sketch prototype for user testing

We utilised our userflows to sketch out wireflows firstly, before sketching our wireframes. We used invision to make a low-fidelity prototype. Once we had tested and iterated with several users we then used sketch to make a mid-fidelity prototype.

DEVELOP
With our goal of minimising the number of features our prototype would have we created a very basic DJing tool with a few features, a means of selecting tracks, crossfading one track into the other and equaliser controls.

However, as we tested with DJs they gave us insights into the essential controls they would need to do basic mixing. Since our goal was to get user’s interactively sharing music we needed to meet their needs. We managed three rounds of testing and iterations and added the following features; cue point, pitch control, and an extra equaliser control.

DELIVER
Our user interviews and testing gave us lots of insights into potential added functionality for this collaborative feature. Our listeners wanted to have more engagement and communication with the DJs so we would like to explore a toggle view for the listener to see the DJ’s view would enhance the listening experience. A video stream of the DJ would also bring the DJ and listener closer together. For the DJ we would like to add further DJ functions to allow for expert mixing.