Designing the future of music curation — a product design case study
By: Josh Nelson
Tags: Product Design, Case Study, Design, UX Design, Tech

Have you ever struggled to find new music to add to a playlist — or struggled to create a new playlist at all?

Enter Otterr… a playlist generator designed to make finding new music, creating new playlists, and keeping up with your friends — all a breeze.

Project Overview

Otterr was originally a student project. Given to me with a few simple, but challenging tasks:

Find a problem prevalent within your social circle

Create an app that is the solution

Create a Business model to ensure your products profitability and long term financial success

With the tasks in place, the constraints were given:

Complete within a 3-month timeframe (March 01 — June 01)

No budget

No outside tactical design help (Solo project)

The Problem

The problem I chose was this; the processes of creating a playlist and finding new music are both broken, drawn-out, and outdated. It shouldn’t take hours to find curate your music.

Otterr is that solution.

Discovery

The discovery phase of the project was simple but effective. I wanted to find answers to a few questions:

What competitors are in the space?

What are they doing well? Not so well?

How can I innovate?

What is Otterr’s value proposition?

With those in mind, I did a thorough competitive analysis and honestly found surprising news. There are no direct competitors (playlist generators) in the Apple App Store. There was, however, a web-based version that was simple in its offerings.

This led to the decision to classify competitors as products offering a curated playlist of sorts. Meaning, Spotify and Apple Music are the main competitors because of their generated playlists around specific moods, genres, or time-frame.

Deciding on these as the main competitors is daunting, but their size allows them to overlook the specificity needed in this area to provide a top notch experience around playlists.

Both of these products have a vast number of positives, but also a vast number of downfalls — this led to a specific subset of findings that could be translated into actionable insights.

Apple and Spotify playlists are the main reason why users aren’t looking for other playlist sources

Apple and Spotify playlists are not fully customizable, specific, or accurate.

Their playlists are too generic, prompting users to rely on creating their own.

This leads to a relatively easy path to innovation in the generated playlists space, be specific.

If playlists are specific enough, then users have no need to create their own and can save both the time & trouble of the process.

Otterr provides this solution and provides value by giving users a new way to curate music while removing a major pain-point in the process.

Research

The research portion of this project was very user-focused and comprised of user interviews, affinity mapping, personas + scenarios, and later on extensive usability tests.

User interviews

The initial user interviews were a huge step in the design process. Before starting the interviews, I recruited 8 participants that fit into the target demographic. Users were asked 15+ questions and directed to use the web-based competitor to get an idea of what a playlist generator could do.

The goal of the user interviews was to test idea feasibility, find out user perceptions, and lastly, find out user’s music listening habits when it pertains to playlists.

Picture of cards with interview questions and answers

To analyze findings I grouped the responses into an affinity map to better organize and categorize the research findings.