Shazam app - Feature Addition
Shazam is a music search engine that quickly identifies songs by listening to a short audio snippet. It uses audio fingerprinting technology to match the sound against a massive song database, helping users instantly discover the song’s title, artist, and more.
Year
2024
Client
Shazam
Goals
My goal was to increase user engagement by encouraging users to spend more time within the Shazam app, while reducing existing pain points to create a smoother, more enjoyable experience.”
Challenges faced by Business:
Shazam made a name for itself as a music search engine capable of discerning the title and artist of almost any song in a matter of seconds. While initially just a simple utility, Shazam’s app has begun to use the data they collect to help users discover new music, follow artists, and even export their Shazam’d songs to a Spotify playlist.
Despite the overwhelming amount of human-centered data they’ve collected on music taste, Shazam has done very little to leverage this information into useful features. Research indicates that the most common use case of Shazam lasts less than half a minute - suggesting that users are using the app to identify a song, then immediately bounce to a different app to collect or listen to the song. Shazam wants to increase time in their app by providing services to help connect users and their music - but they’re not sure how.
My Role:
As a Lead UX Designer with the team of four, we conducted user interviews, created affinity mapping, user persona, problem statement, solution statement, usability testing report.
My project kick off:
After understanding business goals and the expectations and the timeline i started working on creating a road map of how we can achieve the business goals in the 6 weeks of time line
Design Process
Discover Phase:
I followed the Double Diamond Design Process to achieve the business goal of increasing user engagement time in Shazam. To understand why users were not spending much time in the app, I conducted qualitative research through user interviews. Below are my key findings from the study.
After collecting user data, I created a user persona representing the target audience to better understand their goals, needs, and pain points.
Problem Statement:
Music listeners are deeply connected to music—it shapes their moods, memories, and connections with others.Users want quick, reliable ways to identify, revisit, organize, and discover songs without losing meaningful tracks. Current tools often recommend irrelevant genres, fail to recognize music, or overwhelm them with too many options—making discovery frustrating instead of inspiring.
They value sharing and receiving music from trusted sources like friends, family, and like-minded communities, and they want to see what others with similar tastes are listening to so they can expand their library authentically.Users also appreciate effortless, engaging features—like facts about the artist or song—that enrich the listening experience. They need a music discovery and sharing platform that helps them find, save, and connect through music in natural, inspiring ways
Define Phase
How might We’s?
I hosted a focus group to get and discuss the best ideas to resolve our problem statement through “How might we?”.
After discussing we finalize the idea that we believe will bring the most value to the end user.
began the ideation process using AI JAMBOT, collaborating with my teammates through brainstorming sessions to generate and organize multiple ideas that helped structure our ‘How Might We’ (HMW) statements.
After discussing and evaluating each idea, we critically reviewed them and finalized four key ideas that we collectively agreed would deliver the most value.
Design & Deliver phase
After finalizing the four best solutions, I wanted to visualize how those ideas might look in practice. To do this, I hosted a Crazy 8s workshop during our Design Studio, where I encouraged my team to brainstorm and sketch their concepts collaboratively."
After completing the Crazy 8s session, we selected the most promising idea from the many sketches and began bringing it to life. We first drafted the user flow and task flow to visualize how users would interact with the solution and to map out the overall journey step by step.
Next, we began designing the user flows. Using Procreate, I created sketches to visualize the initial design concepts and bring the ideas to life.
Once we finalized the design for each screen in the user flow, I began developing the mid-fidelity prototype to visualize and test how the overall user interaction would look and feel.
Usability Testing: Pain Points and Recommendations
Now that we had completed the prototype, we proceeded with usability testing involving six participants. Through these sessions, we identified key pain points and refined the design accordingly to enhance usability and create a more intuitive user flow.
Task 1 - Hum the tune
Task 2 - choose the match
Task 3 - Browse songs details & share song
Task 4 - Click share to community
Task 5 - Post to 2000’s R&B Community
Task 6 - Browse the community
We conducted both attitudinal and behavioral testing during our usability sessions, using a moderated testing approach to interview participants and gather in-depth feedback.
After completing the usability testing, we revised the user flow based on the insights and pain points identified.
After completing the iterations from usability testing, we began refining the final look and feel of the prototype and overall design solution.
Here’s the Scenario:
You’re hanging out at home and suddenly a tune pops into your head. You can hum it, but you don’t remember the name of the song or lyrics. All you remember is that the songs says “Lonely, I’m Mr. Lonely TUNE not lyrics.” You open this music discovery app to figure it out. Once you find the song, you want to know more about it. After that, you want to share the newly discovered song “Lonely” with your friends. Afterwards, you decide to check out your communities. You feel like finding a new community of people who enjoy groovy music. You decide to check out the recommendations to see if you find one. Once you find one, you browse the page to see if you like it. Play the first song, and follow the new group.
Style guide: Color palette and typography
Result:
After introducing the new feature, 70% of users responded positively, resulting in a 45% increase in user engagement.
My Key takeaways:
I learned how to align business goals with user needs by identifying and solving real user problems. I also gained experience in adding and launching new features that improved user engagement and acceptance, while maintaining brand consistency throughout the design process.