Shazam
Using community features to dust off an iconic product
Role
Product Designer
Scope
2 Week Sprint
December 2020
Shazam has been a lead song discovery app since 1998 (yes…1998), but research indicates that the most common use case of Shazam lasts less than half a minute. Our approach to this problem was to leverage Shazam’s already existing repository of locational data and introduce a new feature called Super Shazam that would amplify the product experience through community. I designed the product experience around this feature where a user can user a gestural launch to search for recommendations based on different filters.
Breaking down the business
To understand a product's design is to understand its business strategy.
The majority of Shazam's revenue is through its referral system to other streaming services such as Apple Music and Spotify. But with a high retention rate, how could we improve their revenue by getting more tags and shares given its notoriety? At 12+ years old, Shazam still stands in the top 3 most popular music apps with over 200 million users and 1 billion "Shazams" a month.
With these stats in mind, I defined four key questions to help focus our business, market, and user research, which led to the creation of a community-focused feature that would aim to solve this problem: Super Shazam.
1
What can Shazam do to increase the value of using their service to map its user’s taste in music?
2
Do people trust the music recommendations of an algorithm or a human more?
3
How could geolocation data become useful to Shazam's users?
4
What role does social networking play in sharing and enjoying music?
A Case of Featuritis
Shazam's largest pain point is its use of a swipe up gesture to access its larger array of music discovery features.
As we see in apps like Tik Tok, the ability discover music comes with the ability share & post amongst a community, which lead to greater streams.
When Apple music acquired Shazam in 2018, new features such as "artists highlights" (think Instagram story-esque) began to creep in with the intent to promote Apple Music and drive up streams. But when feature creeps begin to become buried within a product, the negative impact of a messy navigation and unclear usage begins to only deter users.
This theory was represented in a multitude of our user interviews who hadn't updated the app since they downloaded it. I learned that one gesture could botch the entire UX of a product.
UI Restructure & A Consolidated Feature: Super Shazam
With an energetic yellow and slingshot gesture, Super Shazam gives the user the ability to launch into music discovery by location, genre, and mood.
Using Shazam's brand guidelines, I re-vamped their UI component library and re-designed the user experience five key identity traits in mind. Shazam creates a feeling a feeling of simplicity and play through holding down a button to tag a song. With this same product feeling in mind, I designed our new feature Super Shazam around a new type of sling shot gesture.
By introducing a three-screen navigation, users can no also use their thumb to naturally flow between three states:
1) Shazam
2) Artist discovery
3) Super Shazam
