Tech Intuitions

In an effort to scale an industry where video games sales have exceeded $10 billion in revenue, the average gamer spending 8 hours/per week and 67% of households playing video games, Microsoft will now allow game developers to host their own tournaments on Xbox Live. This move establishes a bold stance from Microsoft to further increase gamer engagement by allowing an open ecosystem for tournament gameplay.   

Music Culture

With the ever evolving nature of music business, society is seeing a huge explosion of investments in the music streaming business.  Record stores in the traditional sense is just about extinct and artists are looking at innovative ways to get music out to fans while monetizing the whole experience from discovery to ultimate fandom. Which the launch of Tidal and Apple Music the Game of Music Streams is ever so relevant now. Couple that with existing players like Pandora, Rdio, Spotify, Songza and SoundCloud you now have a power struggle for music streaming supremacy.  In this post we’ll focus on the music discovery aspect of streaming and how it can be a key differentiator when consumers are evaluating which service to choose.

Impact of Music streaming

In a September 2014 Pando Daily article, we noticed trends of music app usage far exceeding their social media counterparts. This article inspired me to understand the adoption of music streaming apps by conducting a survey around music discovery to help derive common themes that can help uncover the areas of emphasis for consumers.

Problems with the Music Discovery Experience

What has become apparent amongst music consumers is the desire for features on the following:

1.) The ability to have deep insights into the  musicians that inspire the artists they know and love.

2.) The ability to search through sub genres of music.  

Simply searching for hip hop groups or artists doesn’t quite suffice for your everyday consumer who views hip hop in many shades of gray.  With respect to hip hop, there’s conscious all the way to southern trunk poppin’ tunes thats considered hip hop. Now let’s shift our focus to rock. Like hip hop, there are many layers to this genre.  Rock can be classified as indie, pop and hard metal to name a few which appeals to different consumers.  

Opportunities for Streaming Services

With the rise in mobile payments and the adoption of Apple Pay there are many considerations in the payments ecosystem.  What does this mean to the consumer? What does this mean for small business? What does this mean for big business? What does this mean for other payment players in market?

Its obvious Apple Pay provides validation that mobile payments is truly an emerging global push to connect merchants, consumers and card issuers. For the merchant, there's the benefit of better day-to-day operations and intuitive consumer insights.  The consumers will now be equipped with incentive laden experiences to prompt them to digitally pay for more goods and services than ever before.  For the card issuer, as the conversion of cash to digital payments increases, so does their profit margin for their business. 

During the UX Labs meetup we had an opportunity to learn and apply a Heuristic Evaluation on Zenly a startup in NYC aimed to simplify the painstaking process of looking for apartments in the city. 

What is Heuristic evaluation you say? By definition a heuristic evaluation is a usability inspection method for computer software that helps to identify usability problems in the user interface (UI) design.  To simplify this concept it's to identify workflows within the product and capture connections and/or disconnections of the user experience.  

Some of the key elements of a heuristic evaluation are the following:

- Explore: Think of a number of use cases for the product and walkthrough each one with as a potential user and attempt to derive some key observations.

- Record your observation: Document what struck you a good, bad or indifferent as these discoveries help build a case for recommendations and/or feedback for the product.

- Turn observations into actionable insights:  Once the observations have been gathered 

For my evaluation I approached the product as a new user searching for apartments.  For each workflow gap I highlighted  provided a recommendation:

1.) Home page request for email before apartment browsing? 

Recommendation: As a first time user, give users an opportunity to explore the product and request for an email when they elect to book an appointment with a realtor.

2.) Verified by Zenly vs. Avail Now?

Recommendation: As a first time user, Verified by Zenly and Avail Now isn't quite clear given the fact the main value proposition of the product is providing a venting process for all properties. Essentially you can consolidate both options and simplify the experience by showing only available properties.

3.) Avg. rent vs. listing ?

Recommendation: As a long time resident in NYC the first criteria apartment seekers inquire about is PRICE.  Providing the average rent as a filter isn't very helpful to seekers as more expensive properties can overshadow an affordable listing and force the user to look in other areas in the city.  Provide a sliding scale that will allow the user to view low to high cost properties to give a more holistic view of apartment listing.