Designer language — research (Holberton school project)

by: Andrés González and Andy Lopez — Web Stack Advanced Program at Holberton School Colombia, Cohort 13.

Design Thinking methodology to build products(yes, including digital ones)

A brief overview on User Experience Design(UXD)

Building a digital solution or product is not only knowing HTML, CSS, JS, React, etc. And of course, it involves more than a developer's technical knowledge.

Let me show you briefly how an idea or an insight can evolve into a product that you will consume through a web or mobile app.

It actually involves a complex process of design and different stages of conversation between different members of a diverse team. I will give you a brief summary of what happens:

1. There is a team, yes. Probably you as a developer or consumer you think that the developer just receives an order like“code this” to build the next app you will consume. That’s not how it happens in the real life. In real life, the developer is just one of the multiple(and important) pieces in this engine. We have to take into account the different disciplines and roles playing here, let me mention just a couple of them:

• Information Architecture.
• UX/UI Design.
• User Research.
• Accessibility.
• UX Copywriting.
• UX Content Design.
• And so on…

2. No matter the size of the team, once you are thinking about productivity, communication, and efficiency you must think about a methodology, even if it's for defining the possible solutions or developing them(and iterating). We can think about Design Thinking and agile methodologies for this.

Persona and user journey

Let’s assume at this point that we are familiar with the main concepts and processes involved in design thinking methodology, if not feel free to check this entry blog before continuing: https://careerfoundry.com/en/blog/ux-design/what-is-user-experience-ux-design-everything-you-need-to-know-to-get-started/.

In the empathize stage we are looking to get to know better our users by observing them and trying to understand their motivations, meanings, context, and of course pain points, among other factors, in order to get a better approach while finding solutions that bring real value to them.

To empathize and align with all the team, we have two important tools to define who is our user:

• User Persona: these are representations of the most commons type of users and they help us to answer: who are we building for? with this, we can have quantitative and qualitative information.
• User Journey: this is a schema that helps us to understand how a user interacts with a product:

1. It helps us to understand the user’s behavior.
2. Through a User Journey, we can see the actions or basic steps that a user has to follow to complete a process.
3. With a User Journey, we can have a guide about the information architecture.
4. It helps us investigate which are the actions that the user takes and what are the emotions that those actions generate. What kind of users are we approaching? what is the context? what are their objectives?

Spotify project and our User Persona: Regina

For this project of the Advanced Program at Holberton School, we received different User Personas and their corresponding User Journey when using the Spotify application.

The goal was to read them, choose one of them, and follow, and reproduce each step of their journey(assuming we were that person). After that, we had to define a list of all the opportunities for improving this experience.

We defined Regina as our User Persona to start working with:

User Persona: Regina

User Journey: Regina

As you can see Regina had some challenges while using the Spotify application and looking to listen to the music she wanted to at the moment she wanted.

Our insights and potential solutions

At this stage, we didn’t think about what was correct or what was wrong, the idea was to let the ideas flow without thinking if it was a final solution to be made, so we made a list of potential improvements and also insights on how we can design a better solution for her:

1. Arrange liked songs by most listened to.
2. When a song from liked songs is selected, give the option to play liked songs from the same artist or the complete playlist, which can be embedded inside the queue menu to update future songs. (reminders) tooltip…not persistent.
3. Spotify now includes a search option inside the playlist, but a contextual search can work better, the current filter is buried in the menu.
4. The same idea as before, give the option to add more songs under the same gender.
5. List header for GENRE.
6. After clicking on “Liked songs” it would be great to have a small subtitle explaining what is this section about. A little copy like “A list of songs you have liked in the past” or something like that.
7. When reaching the bottom after scrolling all the way down it would be interesting to have the same search/recommendations options as you have in the regular playlists.
8. Tip button at the end of the liked songs list to search for more songs within her playlists. That button will move you through a section where you can see all your personal or liked playlists.

Our brainstorm also included visual references. Let us show you how:

Proposals summary

I bet you find the last section quite difficult to understand since it was just random ideas without a structure. But don’t worry, let us break the main ideas down for you:

1. Allow the user and try to explain to him/her to edit the “queue”. By giving this option through the left-click menu or queue icon, the user will have the possibility to choose what kind of song will be played after the one he/she is listening to.
2. Allow the user to sort the liked songs playlist or any other playlist by Genre.

In this case, we could make quick wireframes instead of plain sketches:

As you can see we add here a genre column

New options in the left-click menu to play list according to the artist and genre

The chosen one

Simple, effective and without a lot of details we choose of course the second option. By allowing the user to sort the liked songs playlist of any other custom playlist by genre, Spotify already has the information provided by the artist and they use it to create playlists based on artist or song (e.g.: go to song radio). Grouping similar genres together. By allowing this, it will potentially give the correct experience they are looking for, meaning, they won’t experience the feeling of “switching from one genre to another” just because.