About the project
The essence of Soundtrap is to give easy-to-use, collaborative, music-making capabilities to anyone with an electronic device and a passion for music.
As one of the first employees at Soundtrap, a music startup acquired by Spotify last year, I helped them grow the company from idea/concept stage to the success they are today.
Role
My role was both hands-on design (prototypes and UX/UI with Sketch and Invision), as well as helping marketing and design teams with layouts, copywriting, user research, and testing.
Through ongoing analysis of users’ needs and improvement of the product, our user base went from 30K to 1M in the first year solely through word of mouth.
As the company grew, I worked on retention strategies and bridged the gap between users and the design/development team ensuring that research, analytics, and A/B tests’ insights were taken into consideration at all stages of the design process.
Through ongoing analysis of users’ needs and improvement of the product, our user base went from 30K to 1M in the first year solely through word of mouth.
As the company grew, I worked on retention strategies and bridged the gap between users and the design/development team ensuring that research, analytics, and A/B tests’ insights were taken into consideration at all stages of the design process.
During my three years, Soundtrap raised €7 million in funding and in the end of 2017 was acquired by Spotify.
Covered by major music and tech blogs, e.g. The Next Web: GarageBand is great but Sоundtrap is a collaborative music app for everyone and TechCrunch: Spotify acquires online music studio Soundtrap as it goes after creators.
Design Tools:
— Sketch
— Photoshop
— InVision
— Zeplin
User research and communication tools:
— Mailchimp + Mandrill
— Qualaroo
User Research and Prototyping - Collaboration Feature
The Challenge
We wanted to understand how do our users play in the studio and collaborate with each other. Do they prefer to play alone or with others? If so, do they invite strangers from our platform or prefer to invite friends. Where do they share link to invite friends? What is missing in the collaboration process?
My role
UX Research
Surveys in Qualaroo
Interviews
Prototyping with InVision and Sketch
User Testing
Method
Research with Qualaroo
Personal Interviews via Skype, in person, and within Soundtrap messaging.
User Personas
A survey designed in Qualaroo
User Interviews
Prototype for Friends Invitation (clickable in InVision)
Current version
User Testing
We used video recordings from UserTesting.com to analyse user behaviour.
The task was to invite friends or other users to collaborate on the music project.
Users would talk as they navigate the website and create a collaboration giving us insights about what is unclear and should be improved.
Outcome
Type of preferred collaborators: Friends
Invite method: Email
Special cases: We wanted to encourage users to collaborate with strangers on the platform. Share case studies of successful collaborations.
We learned that users would rather invite friends via email, and rarely prefer to chat with our users on the platform. We designed the collaboration with that in mind.
However, we decided to focus on creating case studies of successful collaborations between users that have never met before - and now there are hundreds of remote band setups that consist of people that never met in real life.
Number of users that collaborate within their friend network went up by 20%.
Further Ideas
Came up with a social news feed to encourage collaboration.
Designed newsfeed concept detailing users' interaction with each other and contribution to shared projects (Soundtrap version 2015-2016).
Design for gift cards in Swedish and English.
Design and copywriting on drip/trigger emails focused on growth and retention
(Soundtrap version 2015-2016).
