Timeline
07/2020 - 08/2020 (3 weeks)
Team
Andy Jiang, Daisy Lu, Sam Moturi, Gloria Yang
My Role
UX research, brainstorming, storytelling, video making
Project Overview
Technology has so much potential to improve our lives through a myriad of exciting new capabilities. At the same time, people are more stressed, anxious, lonely, and depressed than ever. How can we harness technology to help us with well-being instead of adding to our stress?
Echo is a product for music listeners — with a complete voice user interface that’s built into smart speakers and phones. It collects users’ daily mood & music taste to help them find groups to listen with and to provide them music recommendations. Echo aims to improve our daily lives, as a way of mental healing and stress relief.
Part I. Opportunity Space
In this project, we focused on designing a product with a voice UI that helps people with their well-being. So the first thing we needed to do was to define our audience and landscape. We made a MURAL board and set a 5-minute timer to write down potential audiences on sticky notes.
After discussion, we chose 3 potential audiences (colored in purple) that we found most compelling. And then we added columns and more ideas on post-it notes, such as potential needs, what exists to solve their needs today, and how to recruit people for interviews.
3 top audiences with more ideas
We ultimately chose music listeners as our audience, because music is directly related to mental well-being, and the concept with an interactive voice UI would be well-suited.
Detailed notes on our chosen audience
Potential Needs:
- support his/her favorite artist
- stay updated about their favorite music community
- new music recommendations
- joining online communities to discuss and share their interests in music
- friendship & connection
Existing Solutions:
- Pandora: music streaming and automated music recommendation internet radio service
- News sites such as Pitchford, Billboard, etc.
- Spotify: digital music and podcast service with access to millions of songs and artists around the world
Part II. User Research & Analysis
We interviewed a total of 4 people that are avid music listeners to learn about their listening behaviors, frustrations, needs, and their experience with the existing apps/products. Some key insights were summarized:
- Unsatisfied need when it comes to connecting with other fans
- Hopes to find ways to socially share their music taste, while discovering what’s out there
- Access to music and community directly relates to his/her mental well-being
- Prefers voice command for convenience or when multi-tasking
- Hopes to get music recommendations based on daily mood and music tastes
We then created a persona to help better understand our user type.
We brainstormed ideas for a conversational product that would help meet our persona's needs/goals. And we decided to go with these potential features:
- A product that allows users to engage with an artist and his/her associated fan base. Users can join voice calls and play music together
- A community-oriented platform that allows users to socialize and discuss music with people with similar tastes
- A product that provides users with music recommendations based on their listening history, artists, and favorite genres
- A product that allows fans to stay updated on the latest music based on topics they can follow: i.e. artists, genres, specific instruments, etc
- A product that collects users’ daily mood by asking conversational (back-and-forth) questions, and provides them music choices to select from
Part III. Create
We first created a storyboard, showing how the user can use Echo to complete the main tasks: finding people to listen with, connecting with other music lovers with similar tastes, and socializing with each other as friends.
Using the storyboard as a basis, we then wrote a script (a complete story of our character, Cathy, from exposition to resolution), which became the narration portion of the concept video we made. In the video, we used illustrations and photos accompanied by storytelling to convey our concept engagingly.
Reflection
Due to remote learning and everyone having different availability, it was difficult to coordinate meeting times. I was also in a different time zone which made the collaboration/meetings even harder. But I think most of us tried our best to coordinate assignments, and we were able to collaborate and finish them on time. However, I think there are a lot of areas for us to improve on. We could've done the concept video better - improved the script in a more engaging storytelling way (such as mimicking conversations between the user and Echo), and improved the consistency of the visuals to make it more intuitive.
During the project, I learned a lot about how to create an effective voice UI. I read about Grice’s Maxims (4 rules of the Cooperative Principle), and ethical principles that help designers make decisions when creating products in the real world. Ethical principles describe how our project is avoiding harm or unintended consequences. I learned that a voice UI must avoid ambiguity or obscurity, it should be informative and relevant, and tell the truth with evidence. It’s important for us to write guidelines specifically related to questions of ethics and that are unique situations for our product.
