Music and Audio

Amazon Music was planned to be aggregated into the Sky Glass experience. As part of this there would be impacts across the entirety of the experience. Upon briefing, I discovered the opportunity to look across the experience to what impact would be had. The discoveries I made then change the roadmap in order to accommodate Amazon Music opportunties on Sky.

Business objectives:
To provided aggregated experiences across music and audio that shifts consumption to Sky platforms

Requirements:
Discovery, prototyping, user testing of aggregated experiences including updates to traditional show pages to show related audio/music content, new music/audio show pages (e.g artists page, radio stations, albums,…), new augmented playback experiences (e.g. add track to playlist, who’s singing,…) and augmented browse experiences (e.g. what song is playing now).

What does success look like?:
Increased discovery and engagement with audio/music content via Sky devices

Goal
Ready for Amazon Music Launch Q4

Current experience

  • User can currently access music/ audio apps through glass (albums, tracks etc)
  • User can’t continue ‘listening’ to music / podcasts, without opening the app and going in to find where they left off (all audio behind apps, not exposed in the Glass UI)
    • Journeys could be shorter for returning / continuing to listen
  • Some podcasts are surfaced that link to apps (Audio and Music page)
  • No details about each piece of content (difficult to make decision or specific selection)
  • Nothing to determine which app to open, or give the choice to the user to pick (especially podcasts)
  • Voice search and text search inconsistent – voice goes to app, text does not
    • Voice search opens BBC sounds app when searching for radio 1
    • Text search for Radio 1 does not find BBC sounds related outcome
    • Classic FM voice command opens global player
    • Text ‘Classic FM’ Same with radio 1, no radio stations can be found
  • On listening, the app is on the left of the switcher focus tile
  • Can access music apps from apps and inputs rail
  • Apps and inputs rail updates to used apps first
  • In glance audio stops
    • So if the user is listening and exploring and leave idle it will go off
    • For Spotify the user can no longer access Glass when in Glance mode, so cannot change music
  • Can’t add radio station, podcast, album, artist or track to playlist

Discovery synthesis

Research

A big part of the research for music and audio was diary studies conducted by a third party agency. I worked with them and the product owner in order to set the objectives and what we were particularly looking to find out.

(14 day diary study with 2o participants)

Research objectives

Discovery and playback of audio and music experiences so that customers:

  • Can find their favourite Album, Artist, Playlist, Podcast, Radio programme or station
  • Trigger a playback session and resume easily where they left off
  • Through search, browse or via other related content like movies, tv shows, even mid-playback

The main objectives

  • the primary discovery journeys
  • the primary content types
  • and the primary playback experience that result on the back of this

Summary