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Payment & Onboarding

Abstract

Experience: Digital

Type: Client - PurpleThrone

User Persona: Jasmine James

Objective: A way Jasmine can support independent artists she loves by sending them micropayments.

Payment & Onboarding Solution for PurpleThrone

Context: Music influencers love to discover independent artists that no one has heard of and share them with friends. These music influencers do extensive research to discover new music by these artists.

Problem: How might we help music influencers discover new talent that they are looking to support and keep them engaged in their music discovery process?

Solution: A mobile app for music influencers to discover and support independent artists through direct micropayments.

Solution

During her commute, Jasmine James uses the PurpleThrone app to discover new music - favoriting songs she likes, learning about the artists and contributing to their success through micropayments.

Project Brief

Project: Music discovery service and payment solution

Scope:  Onboarding redesign, payment integration, branding alignment

Duration: 2.5 weeks

Team: Sean Ward, Andy Morris, Alex Orlov

My role: Researcher, Designer, Product Manager

Goal: Discover opportunity areas for PurpleThrone as a business in the music industry and design a solution through research and testing for their users to discover independent artists.

Basic process: Stakeholder interview > Industry Research > OKRs > User Research > Synthesis > Design > Prototype > Test > Next Steps > Stakeholder Presentation

Timeline

Objectives & Key Results (OKRs)

“The experience we are going for is a CELEBRATION OF UNIQUENESS & INDIVIDUALITY.”

Aziz Bey, PurpleThrone’s CEO began dreaming of a way that fans could help support independent artists who were not on major labels.

I translated our stakeholders’ objectives in order to align desired results for PurpleThrone as a platform and business.

PurpleThrone’s stakeholders originally wanted to integrate their own cryptocurrency coin called PurpleCoin into the app which would require a wallet for cryptocurrency. We also found many users had to self educate extensively on cryptocurrency — its creation and how to use — before taking any actions with it. So we agreed to table this idea until we found a way to integrate a standard payment form.

Music Influencer Loop (MIL)

Through synthesizing our user research and industry research we discovered the Music Influencer Loop - how people influence each other’s listening habits. We used this loop to understand our persona’s ideal journey and as a possible template for building out our solution.

How it works

  1. User begins using the PurpleThrone app
  2. She discovers a new artist from exploring different sub-sections of homepage
  3. Landing on Artist Profile, discovers his story and is curious to learn more
  4. She listens/watches a song and likes it
  5. She decides to contribute to his career by giving a small contribution through the app
  6. She is excited about her new discovery and shares out the artist profile and her contribution with friends
  7. Her friends join PurpleThrone and our user continues following the artist she contributed to

Video Content

We researched how users engage with video and audio content to validate PurpleThrone’s choice of being a video based music platform.

Market Research

Listen With Your Eyes

  • 82% of YouTube users use it for music
  • up to 93% amongst 16–24 year olds
  • Free streaming used as an alternative to paying for music
  • 49% of video music streamers do so mainly “Because it’s free!”
  • 27% “sample before buying”

Sources:
2017 Recording Industry Association of America, RIAA Revenue Statistic
2017 MusicWatch, Inc.
Nielsen Music, 2017 Year-End Music Report U.S.

Contextual Inquiry

Understanding Motivation, emotions, behaviors

PurpleThrone Artists: K.Credle - Waves

We conducted contextual inquiries with users to understand:

  • How do they hold a phone when watching a music video? (E.g. leave it vertical or turn it so video is fullscreen)
  • When are users making decisions to remain or abandon a video? (What actions do they take when they want to skip a track? How do they feel in that moment?)
  • How do users value video content? (Are they responding with an emotion to what is seen? Cultural value?)
  • How do users rank video? (Based on emotional reaction)

Users were asked to:

  1. Listen to the video and let us know when they want to skip to the next song.
  2. Watch the same video, giving users the phone & control over their video watching.

We observed actions and timed engagement.

  • Users quickly abandoned audio only experience when they found they didn’t like the song.
  • Users finished watching the video, sometimes scrubbing through, but ultimately finishing the video experience.

Jasmine James, 22

Junior Associate, Ad-Agency

“I hear mainstream music everywhere. It’s really tiring and they play the same songs over and over again. And it’s refreshing to hear something new and different.”

GOALS

  • Discover new art and music for inspiration
  • Influence her friends’ music tastes
  • Save money to move into Manhattan

PAIN POINTS

  • Has to use too many platforms to find artists she may be interested in
  • Can’t purchase everything she listens to but would like to contribute small amounts to an artist when she can
  • Looking to support artists directly without using a major platform like Spotify as middleman

Below is Jasmine’s journey with the alpha version of the PurpleThrone iOS mobile app before our solution  —  her dislikes are our opportunities.

Screenshots from PurpleThrone’s alpha application.

The Problem

Music influencers like Jasmine love to discover independent artists that no one has heard of and share them with her friends. Jasmine does extensive research to discover new music by these artists.

How might we help Jasmine discover new talent that she is looking to support and keep her engaged in her music discovery process?

Designing A Solution

In order to solve Jasmine’s problem we implemented music and video conventions as well as redesigning the onboarding process to help users better understand PurpleThrone’s unique music platform and introduce a payment flow.

Onboarding

Payment

We wanted a universal symbol that users could easily connect with as a way to back artists. The hand gesture of “rock ‘n’ roll” as a symbol allowed users to recognize it in different areas of the app where they could intuitively tap on it to support an artist through micropayments.

Recommendations

Immediate Focuses:

  • Continued Testing of High Fidelity
  • Payment/Cryptocurrency Wallet integration
  • User gratification system
  • PurpleThrone Concerts
  • Artist Flows

Proposed Future Areas:

  • News Section
  • Fan Community
  • Educational Meetups: PurpleCoin & Fan <-> Artist Connections

Next Phase

PurpleThrone has taken our recommendations and design to developers to begin building the beta iOS app. We will support them throughout the process acting as liaison to developers. Release date will be end of 2018 with an Android release shortly after or early 2019.