Problem

You're at a party and your favorite song is playing. One minute in, just before the drop, it stops. Someone wanted another song and pressed next. Sounds familiar? That's the problem we set out to solve when creating Qu. With the contemporary music streaming services, arranging an event leaves the host with two options. Either host decides to be in full control of the music or she makes it possible for the participants to change music as well. The first choice poses a risk of making some participants disappointed and the latter choice can result in a mishmash of unfinished songs. In environments where there are many different wills and where people's minds are often clouded by liquids, there ought to be better alternatives.

Process

Since the project was run under the scope of a university course in prototype development for mobile devices, we had to decide a platform on which to build our prototype. Since neither of us had any vast experience of working with Swift, we chose IOS as a platform.

Collboration

Since the stress of completing products in previous courses have left the UX labour compromised we agreed to focus on creating a prototype with a thorough UX design rather than a fully functional IOS application. The project was run with an agile methodology where milestones were split into iterations and each iteration ran several iterations separately. Working in an environment close to each other and many possible test participants helped us progressing efficiently.

Ideation

After deciding upon the idea of creating a prototype of a democratic DJ application we brainstormed use cases and scenarios. We jotted down our basic ideas and then started our research.

Design and user studies

We began our research with conducting card sorting tests and interviews to evaluate what functionality was deemed most important in our application. The results saw us change direction from making a democratic DJ application applicable for big and small events to only limiting it to smaller scale, private parties. There was also a demand for extra entertainment. We therefore included the possibility to add different challenges.

Working separately allowed us to continuously run several short iterations at the same time, enabling us to back new design decisions with test data.

Microcopy

Putting a lot of focus on design and testing led to several improvements, one of the most notable was the effects working with microcopy had. During user tests we had noticed user paid little attention to an important text, a slight change of microcopy completely changed this. The text that a majority of users didn't read suddenly made all user stop, read the text and then act on the information.

Key Takeaways

Instant Testing

To be able to make quick, well informed decisions, testing needs to be an integral part of the development process. Therefore, setting up a working environment that allows continuous testing enables early verification and great designs to be achieved.

Follow the Pareto principle

Don't overdo it. In many cases testing the same thing too many times won't generate valuable results. Swift testing allows good decisions to be made but running too many tests of the same kind will significantly decrease the progress of the project.

Thorough UX makes a great difference

Sometimes the difference between a carefully considered UX design and a hasty one isn't tangible, both can still look aesthetically satisfying. However, the impact can be significantly different.