Improving UX for music customers.
Improving the user experience across the product.
In 2024 I worked as the primary product designer on PremiumBeat, a Shutterstock company. PremiumBeat is a music stock website that provides exclusive, high-quality tracks and sound effects for use in new and traditional media projects, including film, games, and television programming.
Impact
Being the primary designer on this brand, my work includes so much more than just what is listed above and as you can imagine it’s tricky trying to distill everything I’ve done in the past couple months into a cohesive story (ah, the joy of writing case studies…)
But, here’s some metrics for you:
We closed out 2023 with a 22% decline in conversion.
As of May 2024, new conversion orders were up by 7.5% YoY. Total conversions were still hovering at a 12% decline, but with significant growth in new conversion, it indicates that we must be moving in a better direction to attract new customers.
Problem
At the close of 2023, PremiumBeat’s customer conversion was down 22% YoY. This includes a decline in new customer conversion as well as existing or prior customer conversion. As a team, we understood that changes needed to be made in order to see a healthy increase in conversion. My work was twofold:
to understand the user’s perspective and see what we could do to improve the overall user experience on the website so that customers can find the right track faster, and speed up the process from product discovery to checkout.
to communicate the brand’s value to new customers and justify the cost of our licenses by showing that our product was higher quality and offered more when compared to the competition
Discovery
User interviews
To understand our user’s perspective more holistically, I worked with the Lead designer for the Shutterstock portfolio brands, Amanda, to set up user interviews. We recruited 10 customers who had licensed a track in the past 6 months, asked them to share their screen and talk through how they find content on PremiumBeat, and asked them about any friction points/areas of improvement.
What we found:
We have customers from many different backgrounds, licensing music for many different reasons
The majority of users we spoke to only license single tracks and are not subscribers
In contrast to other e-commerce sites, most users were discovering and licensing content on the product list page, almost never navigating to a product detail page
Unique to music customers, they were using the audio player waveform to quickly scrub through music
Keyword searching can sometimes lead to no results or results that don’t match expectations
Design thinking workshop
In tandem, the marketing and brand team were surveying customers to better understand what stands out to them as the value of PremiumBeat when compared to competitors. What the brand team found was that these value propositions resonated the most with customers:
Quality of music
Worry-free licensing
Freshness + ease of search
All of our licenses include different versions of the track, including shorts, stems and loops
Following the identification of our new value propositions, I decided to run a design thinking workshop with internal stakeholders to brainstorm innovative ways of integrating the value propositions into the digital experience of PremiumBeat. First, I presented some competitive analysis to demonstrate how other brands are approaching innovative ways of communicating value to customers. Then I split everyone up into groups, and each group was assigned a value prop to brainstorm using the Crazy 8’s method – come up with 8 ideas in as little time as possible.
Design synthesis
Implementing learnings from user interviews
Following various discovery activities, it was time to put pen to paper. Something that stood out as a major highlight of the research was that music stock content was discovered and purchased in a very different way than Shutterstock images. Music customers tended to do all of their discovery directly from the product listing page, meaning that it seemed to make a lot of sense to focus on improving the UX of our search results page (SRP).
One way to do this was to add a waveform to the SRP. I noticed during the interviews that users didn’t have anything to help them decide which track to play first, and they tended to go through the music starting from the top of the search results to the bottom. I also noticed that they were interacting with the waveform inside of the audio player quite a bit to scrub through the track, and I heard anecdotally that many users would like seeing a waveform for all tracks so that they could get a visual sense of the form of the track. This was validated through my competitive analysis, where I noticed waveforms being utilized across the SRP.
We A/B tested the hypothesis that adding a waveform to SRP would increase revenue, and the hypothesis was proven to be correct - this is now what you will see on PremiumBeat.
Applying value propositions to the site
I also did a broad exploration of redesigning the PremiumBeat homepage to start to tie in the new value propositions for the brand. This is still a work in progress, but I came up with 3 concepts and the plan is to concept test with users to identify which version resonates most closely with the new brand value propositions.
In addition, we are currently running an experiment implementing a new megamenu navigation structure, which has the added benefit of improving user experience while simultaneously boosting our SEO.