Music app: UI/UX Case Study — How to convert free users to premium subscribers
Problem
The client company is a startup company that launched a music streaming service two years ago. The company’s business strategy was to first build a user base by offering a free product and then evolve the feature set so they could monetize on a premium(paid) product. The product has been well received and has a healthy user base of free uses. Now the company reaches a point to convert the users to pay a monthly fee.
Project Goals
1. Create the opportunity for new users to subscribe to the premium product upon registration in the signup flow.
2. Create the opportunity for returning free users to become paid subscribers in the sign-in flow as well as within the product.
My Role
I was the sole designer responsible for the UX research and UI design.
Discovery
Understand Music Streaming Service
The project’s objective is to create a paid music streaming service with better features than the free experience and giving users the opportunity to upgrade to a better product, users will pay the subscription fee and in turn, will lead to a profitable revenue stream. Therefore, secondary research is conducted to better understand the users from the streaming service and the music streaming service industry.
Key takeaways:
1.The majority of today’s music revenue is coming from streaming.
2.According to GlobalWebIndex's study in 2019, 67%of online adults have used a music-streaming service in the past month. Gen Z leads the way with the highest average streaming times, accessing their favorite tracks across multiple platforms.
3.How music streaming services make money? There are two main identical models to generate revenue:
Paid Subscriptions: Advertising drives free users towards monthly subscription packages, which include various plan options.
Advertising: Advertisers pay for exposure, with ads played every 15 minutes for 30 seconds, and can also include sponsored playlists, and homepage takeovers.
Competitive Research
In order to know about what are competitors in the market offering the music streaming service, what are the features they offer, and how they convert the users? I analyzed the sign up as well as the conversion pushes of Spotify, Pandora, and Apple music, to understand what the methods they used to convert the users.
After understanding the user flow of sign up and upgrade, I compared the functionality of 5 other well-established competitors’ music streaming services. I believed in this way, I could better understand their strategies in setting the tiers from free to paid services, and the report shown below:
Who is using the product?
Based on the information provided by my client, the target users are:
- 18–24 years old
- Tech-savvy — they are on their phones for several hours a day Budget-conscious
- Music streaming service is a very important part of their lives.
In order to identify the opportunities to convert the free users, I sent out the interview invitations to my friends and recruited people from the social media that meet the characteristics of the target users and to understand what their goals, needs and the factors affect their decision in choosing the platforms and upgrading the service.
Findings:
1.Respondents average spent 2–3 hours per day using the music streaming service.
3.Spotify is the most popular streaming service among those respondents.
“ it’s human-driven rather than genre or category driven and it helps me a lot in discovering the music. “
“The annual report is customized for me. Spotify not only tells me what to listen to” but “what I have listened to and liked”.”
“Spotify really cares their users, I have the habit of listening to music to fall asleep, the sleep timer feature is great, it’s a tiny thing but it’s just there when you need that.”
3.When considering a music stream service, here are the factors that from most important to least important:
- Price
- Trust in brand
- Ease of use
- Quality of sound
- Ease of discovering new music
- Personalization
- Availability of exclusive music
- Flexible plans
Define
Identify the opportunities for conversation
By analyzing the competitors, referring to the online user surveys, and conducting the interviews, I have identified the key factors that could be applied to provide a better product with paid features. To help me in explaining the relationship between the factors, conversation opportunities, and pushes for conversation, I created the below infographic: for example, through my survey, I found 56% of the users responded that the “quality of sound” is the main factor, then by offering the opportunities to change the download quality or streaming quality to motivate users to upgrade and the pushes notice will pop up when they tend to make a change.
Idea
Sitemap
After clarifying the relationship between the factors and the opportunities to bring in the conversion, I continued to create a detailed sitemap to serve as the guidance to design user flow.
User flow
Wireframe
The goal of this project is to convert free users to paid subscribers. In order to understand how to immerse the pushes for conversion in the user interaction, I moved on to creating wireframes in Sketch App and designed the opportunities for conversion.
Things to notice: A key function of music is immersion and users do focus work, like studying, writing, or something that involves intense concentration when listening to music, so the “Pushes” or “CTA” should be subtle and fully immerse in the app.
Validation
I used Invision to create prototypes and invited 5 participants to conduct the first round test using a moderated remote user testing method. It allows me to recruit the users faster and easier while we need to keep the social distance at this moment. I sent out the Invision prototypes to the participants via Zoom.
UI Design
Once everything is validated and tested, I move forward to design the interface of the app. To help me with the UI design, I created a basic UI kit for the app containing examples of existing typography, color palette, icons. Then I created initial high fidelity designs. The targeted users of this app are Gen Z and they are drawn to simple lines and bold color patterns. So, in my design, I used the bright red as the primary color and kept the interface simple.
Wrap up
This project is focusing on converting the free users to the premium subscribers and this is also the bottleneck for many apps that need to transit to a new business model. Therefore, what I have learned in this project greatly helps me to apply my knowledge to my future projects. I summarized the key takes aways here:
1.In order to design the opportunities for upgrading, the key point is to understand what is CTA (call-to-action). The CTA is to induce people to take certain actions that present a conversion for a particular page or screen, for example, purchase, contact, subscribe etc. The design of CTA needs to consider the placement of the button and message writing and the design of the button. More details can view my article here.
The scannable areas and place call-to-actions within the user’s path
2. The targeted users of this app are Gen Z and by conducting this design, I have more understanding of the characteristics of the Gen Z-ers. They are tech-savvy and crave stability, familiarity, and comfort. Thus in the design need to build up a consistent and reliable brand and highly value convenience and efficiency.
3. Design Mindset — As described in the above conversion opportunities chart, there are several factors that can be used to generate the upgrade pushes, such as to provide the exclusive episodes and develop the lyrics feature. To decide what to move forward requires the designer to be able to consider various perspectives and synthesize them in order to make decisions.
The above photo clearly explains that UX designers are the meeting points between the technical constraints, business perspective, and desirability. In this project, I created the prototype based on UX research. In the future iterations, more supporting data from the business and technical perspectives should be covered in order to ensure the product is both consistent and relevant.
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