Ariana Davies

SoundCloud users are frustrated by navigation and discovery of music flow

Users struggle to differentiate between albums, playlists, and songs. The streamline of finding where your saved music is and creating a playlist takes multiple steps and was noted an 8% success rate in tree testing. A complex interface forces the user click around before achieving their goals.

Consistency and Ease of Use shortcuts

Adding multiple avenues for creating a playlist increase task success rates by 24% and reduced time taken to complete said task by 82 seconds. Furthermore, adding icons to differentiate media types reported more user directness. Simplifying the navigational structure, increasing the contrast of elements, utilizing the SoundCloud orange to direct user attention, and implementing comment confirmation improved the success rates and confidence of users on SoundCloud.

Community shares music and experience…

Before conducting our heuristic evaluation, we dove deeper into the meaning of SoundCloud’s platform and how users view music today. In a report from BPI and Blackstar…

“From curated playlists on streaming services, to viral short-form videos, songs embedded in video games, TV shows and films, this generation is hearing music that is new to them in every conceivable way and open to discovery. Peer-group recommendations – through shared playlists and in-person gatherings – can be key to these respondents, forming communal soundtracks and social bonds.”

To make SoundCloud a top competitor for a new generation of listeners, we had to uncover potentially overlooked pain points to find what users may be having issues with. Using Nielson’s 10 Usability Heuristics as the basis for our evaluation, we determined the areas of friction for users with SoundCloud’s desktop website.

SoundCloud lacks where others succeed…

SoundCloud is uniquely positioned to advance in the market through its community-driven social features. By better understanding the competitors of SoundCloud, we will gather insights that may lead to a competitive advantage.

To validate our previous findings, gain more in-depth insights into user experience with SoundCloud, and test proposed design solutions in a short time period, we chose to conduct three tests:

Our two main focuses are:

92% of users failed to create a playlist.

Users struggle to navigate SoundCloud, so we gathered 51 participants to conduct a tree test, focusing on core experiences of library navigation and playlist creation. You can find our full SoundCloud Tree Test Results here.

Majority of users found that homepage navigation was easy to miss.

After learning through user mental models on navigation with our tree test, we had 6 participants conduct an unmonitored usability test to experience SoundCloud’s desktop website. This gave us attitudinal data on their reasoning behind decisions and surfaced additional friction points and positivities that were not visible through expert evaluation alone.

25 tasks were created for users to evaluate and share their opinions during their process, so we addressed major key findings with these associated tasks:

Success increased by 45% when adding a create playlist button into the playlist page.

To validate our findings and test proposed designs, we opted to use a quantitative A/B test to compare user experiences between SoundCloud’s website and a tailored prototype based in our data from previous evaluations and tests.

As this was our biggest test yet, we opted for a larger group of participants using word-of-mouth and guerilla testing in places like coffee shops, university campus, and town squares. Test A gained 42 participants while Test B gained 43 participants, so we began synthesizing.

How might we create a consistent, flexible, and community-based music experience for SoundCloud users?

WIP – Coming Soon!