vnyl
iOS app creation for a more scalable, accessible vinyl subscription
Lead UX Designer,
UX Researcher
My Role
Team
Team of 3
2-week sprint
Timeframe
Project Context
VNYL is a monthly vinyl records subscription box service. When you join, you answer some questions about your listening habits, and link your Spotify profile so the VNYL team can pick records they think you’ll like.
Each month, you pick a “vibe”, which is either a curated set of records chosen by a VNYL employee based on your tastes, or based off a featured artist on their site. Either way, you won’t know what’s coming until you receive your records.
VNYL has had some difficulties with their website in terms of users understanding how to navigate through the album selecting process. In addition, their current model requires an employee to select curated albums upon request.
Knowing this information, we sought to address two issues:
How might we make this more scalable if they were to keep growing as a company?
How can we make record listening more accessible to more people?
Identifying the need for a trustworthy curation service to further the vinyl listening experience
research & findings
We conducted research through user interviews and competitive analysis to determine user pain points, and synthesized our findings to define potential solutions.
First, we analyzed the current business and noticed a few things:
Lack of scalability
An employee chooses vinyls upon request, and your preferences are collected in a free response text box
Unclear if they’ll notice when you add/update things, if updates are being saved, or how they manage this
Opportunity for duplicate records
No way to indicate what records you already had
The member we spoke with mentioned they’d received duplicate records they already owned
Accessibility to non-members/vinyl beginners
We spoke with a current member, otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to see beyond the homepage
There’s not much information other than how to join, so you can’t look around before you subscribe
Restrictive for current users
You can’t cancel, pause or edit your membership once you sign up, which wasn’t made super clear to users
The member we spoke with was looking forward to canceling their membership, even with months to go
User Interviews
From here, we sought to understand more about users’ relationship with music, what’s important to them when shopping online, and their thoughts around subscription box services. We targeted music lovers (both vinyl and non-vinyl users alike) for our interviews.
We identified 6 trends through affinity mapping of the interview data, that we wanted to be sure to leverage in our app.
VNYL is quite unique in the market, in terms of surprise, hand-picked curation.
Competitive & Comparative Analyses
All competitors spotlighted the flexibility to change or cancel your membership easily, swap out records, or have service offerings such as live chat customer service. The VNYL subscriber we spoke to mentioned that they received different answers to the same question from the email service on the website and the phone customer service, indicating these two departments were not communicating with each other.
Creating a better experience for existing and potential subscribers, and a more scalable option for the business
Design & Ideation
We expanded on these trends and takeaways to start ideating and designing for our users, and asked:
How can we improve upon the existing service VNYL provides, from curation to receiving the vinyl?
How might we recreate that in person record store experience online?
Given that we have an emotional connection to music, what are users listening to now, what past experiences or concerts are they trying to remember, and how do we bring that to the curation process?
How might we increase accessibility of the service to new users, and retain current users by increasing flexibility of their options?
We also landed on building an iOS mobile app as the best solution. No current VNYL mobile app exists, and we wanted to build something users could refer to conveniently, since they told us they are listening to music at many stages in their days, and are always on the hunt for new vinyls.
Sketching
I led a few rounds of Design Studio for our team, and we landed on the sketches below that prioritize the features that would best address our users’ needs.
Home (left), Account (middle), and My Collection (right):
Focus on building trust on the homepage, given this was a top concern of all users - through plan flexibility, option for guest log in to encourage new users to explore, and access to customer service
Updated quiz format saved to Account, where users can easily add or update items, and VNYL can more easily collect data; plus added Apple Music integration
My Collection and Wishlist to avoid duplicate sends and help VNYL keep an eye out for certain records
Shop (left) and Product Detail screens (right):
Ability to filter by lots of categories, knowing that users prioritized things like price and original items
Product detail screen with mentions of the customer service guarantee; an added social component with friends so you can see what’s in their collections
Reviews from other buyers, recommendations of similar items
3 iterations of Explore screens:
We brainstormed through a lot of different options for the “Explore” feature, which would try and recreate the in-person experience of sifting for records
We landed on the image on the right, a Pinterest and Apple Music-inspired page you could endlessly scroll through, that would be curated for you and different for every user based on their preferences.
We then translated these sketches into the higher-fidelity wireframes below:
Wireframes
Homescreen: highlighting flexible membership terms, access to customer service (chat bot)
Snapshot of Quiz: more easily editable questions that make data collection easier
My Collection/Wishlist: so VNYL knows what to avoid sending and what you’re on the hunt for
Product Details: options to preview, add to Collection/Wishlist, see which friends own this, service guarantees
Explore: recreating the in-person record sifting experience with a Pinterest-inspired scroll
Prototype highlights
Product discovery and checkout flows
Explore feature
Improving on user navigation within the app and accounting for all user paths
Testing & Iterations
Our usability testing results clearly identified our critical areas to implement changes (highlighted in red).
Trend: users particularly struggled to find the Explore page
42% of users left after 16 seconds, despite completing some tasks that took much longer
This shows that users will leave when they can’t find what they’re looking for quickly
Solution: we made it more accessible and added it to the Homepage.
Trend: we also made certain changes to account for all user paths
Users knew to click on this section for Plans, but some of them also wanted to click the area down here with the icons
Solution: we made this area clickable, so we could direct the users where they need to go in the quickest way possible
Next Steps
With more time, we’d like to continue building on customization options for users, knowing that music evokes strong emotions and good memories for users. This could be done through designing predetermined subscriptions/”vibes” based on moods or settings for listening to music.