an audio-sharing and streaming platform that is open to all individuals to explore their creativity in music without labeling the genres and support others within the community. Despite the large range of music genres, SoundCloud recommended only HipHop and Rap genres to all users on the platform. We see this as an opportunity, catering for niche music listeners, in the social aspect of the platform.

In 4 weeks, the team proposed an additional discovery path for the user with research and ideation to leverage the social aspect and hidden niche genres to the customer.

- Research on Music Recommendation Algorithms (2019)

We have conducted 8 interviews with SoundCloud users and have narrowed the target audience to those who use the platform to find unpopular tracks. With secondary research, we found 3 command behaviour for this target group.

We designed our project to align with SoundCloud’s 2 brand pillars

1. The social aspect drives the community of the platform in ways that other music platforms cannot achieve. This comes through comment features on specific timestamp, direct message between individuals and reposting discography.

2. With showing all content to all users, the uniqueness in finding hidden gems of music gets lost along the way.

The audio-first browsing feature lets the user hover to review songs based on the most-commented-on section. The song details show up after hovering longer. The music tag shows the genre of the song and can be further curated by the user based on that genre. The friend’s profile is tagged on the cover to emphasize on the friends-to-friends recommendation. The user can discover more from the shuffle button to get a new batch of songs.

The user can make song recommendations to other listeners to keep the recommendations cycle going. The user can also visit the recommender by viewing their suggestion history on their profile.

From this intervention, SoundCloud will benefit to retain current users based on their listening activities and gain new audiences to the platform through the trusted recommendation systems.

From this intervention, the users will find and have control over the content they receive. This leads to a stronger sense of achievement in their music discovery.

Click here to see the final deck of our presentation.

Throughout this experience, I learned how to think more for users and how important research is for designers. It was the first time I joined such a strong designer team that I challenged my true understanding of design. I’ve learned to trust myself throughout the process and ask for help if needed. Conflicts that occurred forced me to become the Lead User Interface Designer and that experience taught me how to explore, receive feedback and improve my communication skills. I would like to thank my teammates for trusting me and all the mentors for their guidance along the way.