AMP Artist Insights

Too busy to read everything? I got you here

AMP opened my eyes to the music industry. Everything that went into creating an experience for an audience when it came to audio from music to podcasts to shows entered the picture. What I present here is just one hefty slice. Hit the links below to skip to different sections.

Quick links:
My processMy solutionHow I grew as a designer

Overview

First, The Background Context Before Going DEEP

A very designer Grace fashion, I always zoom in and out and thoroughly detail every single aspect of my intentions at every step. I am starting with a preview of how I interview here to get your attention. Remember, this is a case study filled with my rationale for how I led testing and research for AMP. The nitty gritty details behind UI and UX design decisions will follow. Get ready...

This case study aims to show how my partner, Robert Olide, and I combined forces to take his initial work with this project even further. Robert had already been busy redesigning the UI of AMP’s dashboard for months before I jumped in. My role was to add more UX capabilities and smooth out functions and interactions. This included taking over and managing the user tasting phase in collaboration with design, audio programming, and engineering teams.

AMP has been released for over a year, receiving sporadic attention due to its complex and evolving history. Instead of diving into its full backstory, this case study focuses on the latest redesign and efforts to enhance its usability. My partner, Robert Olide, had been redesigning AMP’s dashboard UI for months before I joined to improve UX and streamline functions. Together, we refined the user experience, and I led the user testing phase, collaborating with design, audio programming, and engineering teams to optimize the product further.

My Approach

I pushed to incorporate simple ways of calling attention to what we wanted users to focus on.

Before

After

02 Approaching the Redesign

UI Enhancements: Artist Update Callouts

Just as common practice goes, the top of the page presents what we want users to immediately see and focus on.

The Artist name and subnav is standard here. Users can view Artist plans and offerings from the get go. Perhaps there's something even more potentially valuable.

Lifetime Streams is one of those. Lifetime Streams alone can tell a story about an Artist's popularity and performance. This again allows for managers and labels to plan. Venue sizes with rough attendance estimates is a strong use case. Additionally, the dashboard starts with the Spotlights section to feature new artists and new activity. Metrics determine specific artists here.

As any user, artists, curators, record labels, or managers, it was not immediately obvious what was the newest with new song uploads or news from the view above.

My solution was a simple circle outline outside of the profile image. This stands out even more by being full color when active to indicate selection. Minimal resources and quick. That's my style.

UI Enhancements: Metrics

The following section, Metrics, played another significant role. They're part of why dashboards exist in the first place. That is to allow the viewer to get a high level overview immediately at first glance.

However, the major problem I identified was that it wasn't calling enough attention to these metric changes.

My update was to move it up on the page to be the first thing a user sees and modify the typography with weights. Robert and I came together to make adjustments to the order and I added one small visual tweak by using boxes to separate the categories cleanly. Again simplicity with colors, weights, and IA was all that was needed to make this section more attention grabbing and clear.

I chose to pair metrics above the featured artists because of the principle of proximity. This is natural enough by human nature and does not require anything else.
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Graphs came next to visually convey progress metrics at a glance but I decided to cut them to one interactive graph only. Hence, the upgraded interactive line graph that would show exact numbers at user fingertips.
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This was to hit on more engagement too.

(Pandora Metrics Original View)

Programming Placement

Aside from adding or refining individual assets, I needed to consider placement or where those assets belong.

UI Enhancements: Audience Map

The next visual aspect I contributed to was the map. This map serves to show exactly where and how artists are performing geographically. Managers and labels use this heavily to direct campaigns and plan tours or shows. Artists can glean focus areas for shows or marketing.

Robert already designed this map before I joined this project. I only added input on colors, element placing, hierarchy, and sizing.

This updated view was more straightforward, therefore reducing time to understand. For instance, the circles highlighting areas are bigger and easier to see, which was what I was going after.

When it comes to the work this round itself, the rapidly changing schedules on our teams and their subgroups and visions weren’t quite aligned at first, as I would gradually learn from the get go. I came on board to focus on UX and found myself making UI adjustments to Robert’s work.

Are we on the right track?

Testing

I acquired context and established more context.  I then researched more to align the team to fill knowledge gaps and managed the logistics to establish testing guidelines and scheduled interviews.

Target Audience

We just needed to know if our identified problems were truly problems before determining how to fit it into the already tight and constantly changing timelines across our engineering, marketing, and programming teams.

(Test Guide Snippet A)

(Test Guide Snippet B)

Research  Objectives

Identifying insertion points

Flexibility & Game Plan

It was pretty clear to me that we needed to have a plan that can resist all these changes. Flexibility is king.

I made it my priority to create a set of guidelines for anyone, not just me or Robert, to be asking questions. This allowed for any teammate to step in if needed.

I created a game plan to do all this.

Interviewees

As the leading designer for testing here, I took it upon myself to work with the official Product Managers and engineers to set a clear roadmap and plan for how we’d go about testing. I first wanted to emphasize that the purpose of testing for this round was to validate. We didn’t need to go into micro-details here.

Consolidation

It didn't take long to realize questioning components and details so closely was going nowhere.

This didn’t stop what I needed to do. I still needed to bring AMP up to speed with more up to date UI and UX and fast, strategically.

Robert came in to assist and we decided to let the interviewees drive the interview as much as possible. That means less talking from us interviewers and interviewees would take us to the topics with even more answers on their own.

Are we on the right track?

‍1. Does context make sense?
2. Are headers and categories clear?
3. How can placement be better?

Tell us everything and more

Tag Team Strategy

Tag teaming meant taking turns asking questions and filling in when needed. This was where chemistry really kicked in and made all the difference because our strategy went even further.

Going with a template

A template is how we provided the path for our execs to give us what we needed, plenty of validation included.

Interview Starting Points

The template told us the sequence of questions to ask interviewees. They'd be the ones driving this and directly invested and engaged in improving Artist Insights.

Interviewing in Action

I took turns with Robert to interview internal stakeholders. This is a clip of me guiding Marcos, one of the SiriusXM programming leaders, towards setting the direction of this interview with the template.