Challenge Statement & Benchmarking
How might we allow new, signed in users to define their music taste and offer an increased level of personalisation when visiting BBC Music on desktop?
With the above in mind, I started by looking at how the BBC Music app tackled onboarding, and then moved on to analyse other responsive music sites and apps such as Apple Music, Soundcloud & Deezer.
Deezer's 'Tinder' style artists approach
Apple Music's growing 'bubble' format
Soundcloud's tooltip onboarding
Journey Mapping
To understand exactly where in the journey a user would be prompted to define their music tastes, I created a flow to highlight when and how we trigger this. This was a helpful task in defining how the final concept should function, and allowed me to focus on two areas: upselling the onboarding experience during sign in, and the onboarding itself.
Ideation
The initial sketches and low-fi wireframes covered a whole range of different ideas including gamification and quiz formats, as well as safer options such as static in-page upsells and modal overlays.
After diverging, I held a critique session with the design team to narrow down the options. We voted on the idea we thought had the most potential and took this to user testing.
Chosen Design & User Testing
The chosen concept consisted of a series of step-by-step modals which encouraged users to tell us their preferences in friendly, bitesize chunks post signing in. The steps and format were similar to the BBC Music app to keep a consistent experience across platforms.
The onboarding process had four steps overall. It asked users about their favourite genres, stations and music events (in that order). Based on these answers, the last step in the process generated a range of artists a user might like to follow on BBC Music.
The finished prototype taken to user testing (Built using Proto.io)
Next Steps and Involvement
Next steps: User testing showed that despite the idea being well received, users would not engage with the modal in a natural setting. Therefore, further exploration was carried out to find a less obtrusive trigger.
Involvement: Direct involvement throughout, with input and guidance from senior leads and wider product team. Close collaboration with UX research Selena Whitehead on crafting discussion guides and conducting lab testing.
