I decided to reach out to the Deepr team after learning about their products through an article highlighting Atlanta music companies to watch. After completing a design interview project of the website, I began working directly with the CEO, the UX and PR/Marketing teams to improve the mobile product. Most employees were part-time, so the bandwidth of teams tended to change on a weekly basis.
My first tasks were focused on UX Research and Design. I conducted a heuristic evaluation of the website, app store posting, and their active WeFunder. I synthesized my findings and reviewed them with the UX team, and the CEO passed along updates to the development team to update the website. I used Figma to redesign the images used within the app store, duplicating the images and updating them with images of the different versions of iPhones, iPads, and Google phones to make the user experience relevant no matter the device.
After this, I switched focus to a heuristic evaluation of the mobile application. Metadata showed that the number of user downloads was much greater than the number of user accounts (you are asked to create an account upon logging in). This led me to conduct a competitive analysis of 2 mobile applications from different online music communities. I synthesized my findings and reviewed them with the UX team, and the CEO passed along updates to the development team. As the development team would push updates, I created and conducted A/B testing scenarios to verify fixes worked as expected. This required me to create and edit videos of me troubleshooting user flows and explaining to the CEO why something was not working as expected; this refined my design language and attention to detail.
Problems & Risks
A developing growth strategy with insufficient resources to enact every idea
Complex information architecture that required expansiv, routine cleanup
Absence of digital community that could increase engagement
Lack of user feedback on company's strategic direction
My Contributions
Create competitive analyses across other music and entertainment mobile applications
Evaluate and redesign app store images, website, and user flows in mobile application
Build content for demos with potential investors and stakeholder meetings
Investigate user interest in new features through survey creation and analysis
Clean creator and track metadata while learning about music information architecture
QA new releases and Deepr Talks before publishing
My final redesign of the images used in Deepr's download page in the Apple App Store
Project Research
I undertook three major research studies while working with Deepr: an 'Insights' feature to allow users to learn about their music trends, a 'Community' feature to allow users to communicate, collaborate, and learn from each other in the app, and understanding how to roll out project management tool ClickUp for the company.
Deepr Insights
Spotify's Wrapped feature has achieved a viral status, and the Deepr team was curious if our users would use a similar feature that is more focused on creator and song discovery within Deepr. I began researching the origin of Spotify Wrapped and various user feedback on the feature.
Deepr Community
The founders of Deepr received feedback from potential investors that having an interactive, engaged user community could make a strong argument for investing in Deepr. I researched other digital communities or music technology which had a cult following, such as Reddit, Verzuz, music-related Facebook groups, and more.
ClickUp Rollout
Deepr's CEO shared that since most employees held other jobs, it was hard to keep track of employee's work, progress, and timelines. The company had previously attempted to use ClickUp, but its usage died off. Given my project management background, the CEO asked me to try to resurrect the system.
Research Impact
Deepr Insights
We received 7 responses on our survey, which complicated extracting meaningful findings due to the narrow sample. The survey did highlight a few ideas that would need further research to understand. One of the more interesting questions had participants rank 11 features of the app from most important to least important; we included a potential feature of Insights that were not present in the app at the time, 'Analysis and summarization of your listening habits.' On average, this feature ranked #7, meaning survey participants thought this was more important than existing features. This showed that Insights may not be a fruitful enough addition to justify changing the development team's current prioritization of work. This also showed that the lower-ranked features could either be made more obvious or better taught to users. Just 4 of 7 participants stated that they were interested in learning more about their listening habits, so we decided that Insights should not be pursued at this time.
Deepr Community
In full transparency, I ended working with Deepr just after sending out the survey to begin my first semester at Georgia Tech. While I do not know what exactly happened next, I know that the full Deepr team had to shift focus in the Fall to developing technology for their new partnership with ALLBLK. The community building plan will require conscious effort from all employees, and can be resumed whenever the team has more availability. I am hoping to take a class offered by my program called 'Design of Online Communities', which could greatly help my understanding of community needs and improve the plan I assembled for Deepr.
ClickUp Rollout
The co-design session was successful, and two robust timelines were created to begin the community management plan. People continued to use the system and ask questions through my departure. ClickUp was then leveraged as a tool once the team shifted focus to planning the ALLBLK development and deployment. I believe my training and communication helped the Deepr team warm up to the system again, and I am glad they found a renewed utility for the system.
Answers to a question from the Deepr insights survey
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Deepr Insights
While researching, I asked myself, what metrics would I be interested in learning about my discoveries in a year? These 'Insights' had to be grounded in data available in the app and ideally unique to Deepr, compared to other streaming services. I created 20 metrics to review with the UX team, and the most well-received metrics were included in a survey I created for Deepr users. I collaborated with a UX teammate to design a 7-question survey in Typeform. We devised a distribution strategy to app users and investors, and sent the survey eager for results. This was my first attempt at survey creation for user research purposes.
Deepr Community
After leading a UX and Marketing team discussion about our findings about online communities, I began drafting a community-building plan; this included a user research study, persona creation, designing a visual language and design assets, and an overarching growth plan with metrics. This plan was reviewed and approved by the UX team, Marketing team, and the founders of Deepr. The first step was creating a survey focused on what users would like out of a community. For both the Insights and Community surveys, our team provided detailed feedback on how to improve verbiage and structure of the overall survey, requiring me to iterate and improve multiple versions.
ClickUp Rollout
I interviewed a few employees to understand their feelings and reactions to ClickUp and began drafting a rollout strategy for the CEO to approve. I also revisited some of the literature I learned from the ADKAR Change Management training I received in early 2020. I decided to lead a co-design session with the UX and Marketing teams so that they could offer input on what their tasks and deadlines should be. After leading a training session on the software, I allowed everyone to question the structure and intentions of its usage. This led to an open discussion about availability and communication, and how one person can impact our small team.
A segment of the affinity map created for insight about Gen Z listening and discovery habits.
Conclusion
I greatly enjoyed my time with Deepr, enough to take on a user research project for Winter 2021. This project required me to create an affinity map from 10 user interviews, and draw findings and design implications. The interviews uncovered how users are discovering new music today, what online tools they used to learn more about music and creators, and why they chose to learn more about the music. We then used this data to create two personas and a user journey map which will be used to inspire the third major redesign of the mobile app.
The Deepr team is full of inspiring people, and using the app remained a weekly habit even when I was not working for them. I am grateful that I learned and practiced the beginnings of my prototyping and survey creation skills before beginning at Georgia Tech. This experience served as a bootcamp in learning foundations of working in UX, working in music technology, and working for a startup. It was a refreshing cause to work for, and I am so excited to see the company continue to grow.
