Under Pressure : A record store’s push from in-store to online — a UX Case Study
By: Katlyn Conklin
Tags: UX Design, Case Study, Music, Figma, Ux Case Study

Those Magic Changes

Creating a Digitally Augmented “Music Discovery” Experience

General Homepage Improvements

A lot of the feedback I received from user interviews was how dark and crowded the homepage looked. At least 5 out of 6 users said almost verbatim “I don’t know where to look right now.” I cut out a lot of the information that was originally on the Amoeba homepage and reorganized and created these collection feature cards at the top.

Comparison of Amoeba’s current homepage vs. redesign

Light Mode — I chose a white background to give the site a bright and clean look that way Amoeba’s bold colors stand out and the full focus is on the color of the album covers.

Collections and Recommended — Right at the top I put collections with quick links to access themed results. For any user just trying to quickly browse music, “New Releases”, “Most Popular”, and “Staff Picks” will feature related albums right on the homepage for immediate viewing. These were categories I found to be most helpful to users during my interviews and card sort.

Album Cards —For the album cards, I wanted to create a similar experience for when you’re looking for music in a record shop. In the store you initially only see the album cover, the title, and the artist. To find out more, you flip the album over to read the back. To duplicate this online, you have to “dig a little deeper” and click the album to look at the product page.

Main Navigation Menu

A lot of Amoeba’s current site navigation is repetitive or unnecessary for main navigation. I used the four main categories from the hybrid card sort and pushed additional information and links to the footer.

Personalized Recommendations

Personalized recommendations on homepage of existing user

To encourage users to create a profile with Amoeba Music, they’re able to follow artists and on those artists’ pages they can see what albums their artists are listening to, with a ‘Call to Action’ (CTA) to buy those albums directly from Amoeba. Albums are recommended based on the user’s tastes.

Product Page

Comparison of Amoeba’s current album description page vs. redesign

Currently, Amoeba has different product pages for each format the album is in (CD, Vinyl, or Digital). In the redesign, I condensed to one page per album, where you can select the format you want. You can also see product details, and there’s a clear CTA to add to cart.

Amoeba Personality

Redesign of Amoeba’s Sign-In/Sign-Up

I wanted to keep Amoeba’s funky and off-the-beat character in the redesign, so I made sure to use Amoeba’s bold colors and used some of Amoeba’s fun illustrations throughout the prototype.

Faceted Navigation

New faceted navigation on product pages

Since the most important aspect of shopping at a record store is the search and discovery, I wanted to build an advanced search on the album product pages for users to discover new music through multiple avenues.

The biggest players in the faceted navigation are the search bar and the genre tags. The search bar is placed above the selection bar for users to quickly access the music they’re looking for, and the active tags allow users to discover new music with a selective search based on their preferences.

(Wo)Man in the Mirror

Reflections and what I learned

Through this process, I realized the importance of user research and informational architecture in the design process. A website can look beautiful, but if it’s unorganized or hard to navigate, the user experience will suffer.

Due to the time constraints and limitations of working on this project remotely, further research needs to be done with users who specifically collect vinyl records or who are an existing Amoeba Music customer. I would like to do some usability testing on the high-fidelity prototype I created to refine and validate the solution.

Don’t Stop The Music

The Conclusion

“Vinyl is the real deal. I’ve always felt like, until you buy the vinyl record, you don’t really own the album. And it’s not just me or a little pet thing or some kind of retro romantic thing from the past. It is still alive.” — Jack White, American singer-songwriter

Amoeba Music is an iconic landmark. It has pioneered and transformed the record store landscape and has greatly contributed to the music industry. On top of its vast and obscenely large collection of records, tapes, and CDs, Amoeba has hosted thousands of live, in-store performances, from Sir Paul McCartney to Lana Del Rey. When the restrictions and regulations are lifted, I’m confident music-lovers will rejoice, and Amoeba Music will bounce back better than ever.

View and interact with the prototype: