Meet your personalized music that just prepared for you based on your tastes and mood.

Overview

As the lead designer of the product, I worked closely with PMs and engineers to move the product experience forward. My responsibilities included communicating new ideas, cooperating with PMs and developers to analyze user requirements, and prioritizing feature designs to advance our product's overall experience.

MY ROLE
UX/UI Designer
Visual Designer

METHODS
UX/UI Design
Visual Design
Interaction Design
User Study

DATE
2015

Meet with Your Music

Douban FM is a popular music app in China, which ranks in the Top 3 music apps in the iOS App Store in China market. And it has more than 65 million users. It applies auto-matching technology to personalize your music channel and library, and recommend new music based on your favorites.

Douban FM opens for all the music fans who have their tastes. It helps you to find the best songs fitting to your preference. The algorithm of the app can analyze your listening history and feedback to recommend songs that customized only for you.

Design Principles

Having several rounds of user studies and competitor analysis, we focused on providing an immersive listening experience and highly customized music to our users other than presenting a catalog of the existing songs in the market. To deliver a decent experience, we decided to simplify the interactive steps, optimize the information architecture, and reduce visual noise. 

Simplicity
Allow users to play their music right away in just a few steps. With simplified actions, our users can tune in their preferences.

Clarity
Encourage users to focus on listening by removing unnecessary visual elements and sophisticated layers.

Immersion
Utilize native navigations and layout to reduce learning curve and offer an immersive interactive experience.

Play + Tune

It's powerful when I designed with data. Collaborating with user researchers and engineers, I found that the most used 3 actions in our application were Red-heart (Add to favorite), Delete, or Skip. These implications represented a strong signal for me to simplify our feature design on the main flow. In the meanwhile, we offered more sophisticated actions, as secondary, in the drawer. 

Enjoy
Your Music

We wanted to improve not only the listening experience but also the ways users to discover. The best approach was to establish a community in which millions of users could share their playlists and collections to make a thriving space. We introduced two channels allowing users to discover diverse music in different styles.

MHz 
Meet music that users will love based on moods and themes.

Playlist
Check out daily playlist customized for users, and share it with friends.

My Favorite

As the most visited tab, My Favorites collected all users' favorite music. Which also played a key role to flourish the personalization and recommendation to users.

The more users Red-hearted (Save) their favorite songs, the more the application understood users.

Discovery

We realized that users were in favor of exploring profiles of signers and musicians as well as other users' collections and MHz.

While they were discovering, we experimented with listing the relationship between songs and people. We believed that this is an excellent opportunity for our users to capture new things that they never touched before.

Designs

© YING ZHAO