Design Solution

Echoes is an feeling-centered music platform that encourages listeners to share their feelings and stories, fostering mutual communication between musicians and listeners.

Key Features

For listeners

1. Discover music through resonating with others’ feelings

This is a brand new way for listeners to discover songs. They will see recommended songs on the discover page depending on their interaction with songs, stories and impressions. Songs are recommended in the form of stories.

Rationale: As one of our interviewees has said: Story is a new way to look at music. We want to show people's resonance together with songs to better connect listeners with musicians and other listeners.

2. Express your feelings for music in a natural and creative way with 2 possible levels

When listening to music, listeners can use Impressions: visual elements or words tags to quickly express their feelings. They can also choose to write down Stories to share their feelings on this song.

Rationale: It's not easy for listeners to express their feelings about music. We designed two levels of expressing ways, Impressions is easier to produce and can express more abstract and simple feelings of the song, and Stories requires more energy to produce but would carry deeper meaning for both musicians and themselves.

Add Impressions

Post Stories

3. Keep your memories related to music in a diary

On the profile page, all listeners' impressions and stories are kept in the form of a diary. They can revisit and look back on the feelings again at any time.

Rationale: Listeners’ stories and impressions always carry different memories in different periods of life for them. Keeping their feelings as a diary give them an opportunity to aware of their emotional change and review life experience.

4. Interact with musicians and other listeners with shared feelings

Both listeners and musicians could react to others feelings and add comments in a very easy way. Musicians would also be able to collect listeners’ stories to their own collections and show them on their musicians' page.

Rationale: The potential interaction with musicians is one of the most motivating factors for listeners to give in-depth feedback to music. Our research shows that one obstacle for listeners to give feedback is the feeling that musicians would not read and be interested in their feelings. By providing ways for them to interact, their are encouraged to give more meaningful feedback.

Key Features

For musicians

1. Read and react to stories and impressions of their own songs

On the music page of musician version, they can clearly see new stories and impressions from listeners about their songs. They can also check old stories by songs.

Rationale: While listeners think that musicians would not be interested in their personal stories, musicians are actually eager to know the impact that their songs have brought to listeners. This will become their stories repertoire, which will give them inspirations and encouragement.

2. Interact with listeners based on their feelings

Musicians are able to collect stories and impressions from listeners to build collections for different themes, and give comments at the same time. These collections could be set as public on musicians' page, and the data could be used to make promoting materials or put on their website.

Rationale: Listeners feelings and feedback are significant for musicians. They could not only bring inspiration and a sense of self-actualization, but are also a great way of spreading and promoting musicians' work.

Process and Methods

Interviews & Observations

Why is mutual relationship important?

Musicians are eager to hear from their listeners

The success of a musician highly depends on their relationship with listeners. According to our interviews with musicians and secondary research, we concluded that for musicians, mutual relationship is critical because of three reasons:
(1) the fulfillment of self-actualization;
(2) a way to promote their work
(3) a source of inspiration

Interviewee's quotes

“They want to be social but also don’t want to embarrassingly promote themselves”.
“I used a lot of audience feedback....learning and transfer those to my new album indirectly.”
"When you wrote a song that yourself can connect to and people like it, it feels so special because it’s like “this is my heart and you’re singing along to a piece of me.”

Listeners want to share their feelings

Most listeners we interviewed said sometimes they do want to share their feeling with others to get resonance. Telling a story about a song is not only a way to give feedback and support, but also a way of self-expression. If they know that there is a possibility that musicians could see what they have shared and interact with them directly, they will have a strong feeling of mutual understanding.

Interviews & Observations

What has prevented the mutual relationship?

Musicians do not have suitable channels to get meaningful feedback

Offline feedback is usually more meaningful and deep but limited in number.
Currently, they get deep feedback mostly in live performance. But this kind of feedback is relatively small due to physical limitation.

Online feedback is not meaningful and authentic enough.
The feedback musicians get from existing online platforms, such as Youtube, Spotify and Instagram, are mostly too abstract or irrelevant to their music. They can only know people like it or not but know little about how and why. “It’s weird that people listen to your music, but you don't know them”

Listeners do not have enough motivation and confidence to share feelings

Lack of motivation
Listeners mentioned that one reason they rarely give feedback directly to musicians is that they think musicians are unapproachable, and “they won't want to read it”.

Lack of confidence
Even when they feel strongly about a song, they don’t know where and how to express them. They feel like they are "not artist or writer" and cannot fully their convey feelings.

Interviewee's quotes

"A lot of times we can’t express what the music is like through words, we can only talk about genre.”
“I don’t think they want to read my feeling”
“If she is not that much popular, maybe I will try, but that rarely happen, I just feel like they are untouchable"

Co-design workshop

What are the possible ways?

In order to explore ways of facilitating mutual communication between musicians and listeners, we organized a workshop and invited a group of listeners with diverse music-listening habits and music tastes to co-design ways to express personal experience related to music. In this workshop, we mainly explore these two aspects:
‍
1. Forms and content of feelings
2. Motivation of sharing feelings

and we got some insights in both aspects.

Forms and content of feelings

The form of feelings could be either visual or verbal; it could also either be abstract or concrete.

When the feeling is produced with more effort, both the shared person and the person being shared will feel like it's more valuable.

Give some prompts or provided elements would lower the barrier of producing feelings but still allow the feedback to be personalized and emotional enough.

Motivation of sharing feelings

Listeners can be motivated to document their personal experiences related to music as a personal record for the purpose of memory keeping

Listeners can be motivated to read others’ personal experience by new discovery of music based on people’s thoughts instead of the analysis of objective attributes done by algorithms

Listeners can be motivated to share their personal experiences if musicians read them and give feedback.

Ideation

Brainstorming

We did several rounds of brainstorming to explore possible forms and contents of feelings based on the insights we got from both musicians and listeners.

Semantic Differential

Balance the meaningfulness and required effort of the feelings

Based on our research, we can see one of the key problem we need to figure out is how to balance the meaningfulness of the feelings for both musicians and listeners and the effort required for listeners to produce them. We analyzed this with semantic differentials.

As we can see from the matrix, most meaningful feelings require extra effort from listeners. Actually the effort they are paying is one of the factors that makes it more valuable. Finally we decided to combine Music stories and Music memory diaries together to balance the meaningfulness and required effort. Though music stories would require more effort, but we could provide prompts or predesigned elements to make it easier.

Design

Wireframes

To quickly validate the concept, we straightened out the key user flow on whiteboard.

User Test

Then we tested the sketched prototype with two musicians and five listeners. It was quite exciting that almost everyone told us they like this idea, and we got lots of feedback.
‍

"I'm exciting about reading their stories and interacting with them"

Musicians are exciting to interact with listeners in such an emotional way. They believe that stories would bring new meaning to their music.

"I hope I could use these storeis on my website"

Musicians mentioned that these stories would be a great way to spread their work and engage new listeners. They hope these stories could be collected and used for other purposes.

"I still feel like it's not that easy for me to write a story"

Although we provided visual elements and lyrics prompts, some listeners still feel that writing a story requires a lot of efforts. They still feel the barrier is not low enough, which means the frequency of writing stories would be very low.

"Reaction from musicians is exciting, but I also want to have more interaction with other listeners"

Besides just reading and react to other listeners' stories, listeners feel that it would be easier to get resonance if they could have more ways to interact with other listeners.

Based on the analysis of the feedback, we made some design decisions to iterate our concept:
1. Add another level of feeling: impressions, which is easier to express for listeners
2. Add more ways for musicians to collect stories and using the data
3. Add ways for listeners to interact with each others' feelings
‍

Prototype & Userflow

Coming soon...

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Echoes

A feeling-centered music experience that connects listeners and musicians

Challenge

Design Solution

Key Features

For listeners

1. Discover music through resonating with others’ feelings

This is a brand new way for listeners to discover songs. They will see recommended songs on the discover page depending on their interaction with songs, stories and impressions. Songs are recommended in the form of stories.

Rationale: As one of our interviewees has said: Story is a new way to look at music. We want to show people's resonance together with songs to better connect listeners with musicians and other listeners.

2. Express your feelings for music in a natural and creative way with 2 possible levels

When listening to music, listeners can use Impressions: visual elements or words tags to quickly express their feelings. They can also choose to write down Stories to share their feelings on this song.

Add Impressions

Post Stories

3. Keep your memories related to music in a diary

On the profile page, all listeners' impressions and stories are kept in the form of a diary. They can revisit and look back on the feelings again at any time.

Rationale: Listeners’ stories and impressions always carry different memories in different periods of life for them. Keeping their feelings as a diary give them an opportunity to aware of their emotional change and review life experience.

4. Interact with musicians and other listeners with shared feelings

Both listeners and musicians could react to others feelings and add comments in a very easy way. Musicians would also be able to collect listeners’ stories to their own collections and show them on their musicians' page.

Key Features

For musicians

1. Read and react to stories and impressions of their own songs

On the music page of musician version, they can clearly see new stories and impressions from listeners about their songs. They can also check old stories by songs.

Rationale: While listeners think that musicians would not be interested in their personal stories, musicians are actually eager to know the impact that their songs have brought to listeners. This will become their stories repertoire, which will give them inspirations and encouragement.

2. Interact with listeners based on their feelings

Musicians are able to collect stories and impressions from listeners to build collections for different themes, and give comments at the same time. These collections could be set as public on musicians' page, and the data could be used to make promoting materials or put on their website.

Rationale: Listeners feelings and feedback are significant for musicians. They could not only bring inspiration and a sense of self-actualization, but are also a great way of spreading and promoting musicians' work.

Process and Methods

Ideation

Design

@2019 Yingxia Lou. yingxialou@gmail.com

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Work