Soundcloud redesign | Marvin's portfolio

Soundcloud : usability testing

Introduction

Soundcloud is one of the most widely used music streaming service.However, the website and the mobile application still seem to have a few usability issues.As a group of 5, we tried to improve the user experience of the platform by addressing the following issue:

About Soundcloud

Soundcloud is an online streaming service created in 2008 by Alexander Ljung and Eric Wahlforss. What makes it unique is the fact that it allows any artist to post music content, making it accessible to nearly 175 million users. Thanks to the platform many artists have become famous, including the new "Soundcloud rappers", exclusively known thanks to the service.

In order to be aware of the problems that users were encountering, we had to observe them using the service. We also needed to take time to analyze usage on a larger scale.
So we decided to go follow 3 phases plan :

Process

Research

Survey

Tests

Creation of the test and observation scenario

Solution

Wireframing and prototyping

Problem statement

Make the platform usable for everyone :

Improve the feature of leaving a comment at a specific moment of a playing music

1. Research

Survey

Quantitative research

We designed a 30-questions online survey in order to understand the targets usage habits and profiles, but also their favorite functionalities. We also sought to find out whether they found the site usable using the UMUX usability scale.

815 respondents participated in the survey
The survey has been distributed on Twitter and Linkedin
The majority of respondents were aged between 16 and 25, revealing the average age of Soundcloud users

Usability scale results analysis

We first analysed the results of the usability scale, which is designed to measure the usability of a website or a system in a numerical way, and then transposed our results to the SUS scoring system.
We obtained a score on the SUS scale of 69.57, corresponding to the level of usability of the platform.

The score thus obtained is rather mediocre, ranked between the usability level of Excel and an old GPS ...

Survey answers

Following the analysis of the survey results, we have established the following facts :

29,7%

Use another platform because they feel the service is better

70%

Ue the search bar, so they know which content they prefer

43,9%

Of weekly users report listening to music between 11 and 30 minutes per session.

Assessment and recommendations

Based on our review of the data, we have made the following recommendations:

Assessment

SoundCloud, while having a large number of visitors and users, is more seen as an alternative to leading platforms such as Spotify, Deezer and Apple Music.The application is much more widely used than the site.

Recommandations

It is important to improve the interface of the website application, especially the comments functionality.
Sound quality is also one of the weakest points of the SoundCloud platform.

2. User testing

Observation and results

In order to know the most urgent problems to solve, and to judge the ease of use of Soundcloud in general, we have established a test scenario taking into account the main features of the site in desktop version :

Missions of the user test :

Find a specific artist and song, in order to know if the search bar of the website was well placed
Start listening to the song, to make sure the listening, as main function of the website, is easy
Leave a comment at a specific moment of the song, in order to see if this exclusive Soundcloud feature is easy to use

During the test, we also asked users to describe their actions, to explain their meaning, and finally to tell us if they encountered any difficulties.It should also be reminded that the scenario administered was the same for each of the testers.

User testing results

For the 6 testers, some of whom had never used the website before, we obtained the following results :