Users Demands: Why Users Want to Know Stories Behind a Song?

Sensual pleasures.

In ancient China, music is among those sensual pleasures, which would sap people's will.

But for me, that's not such a bad thing. Because you should understand it before you get addicted to it. I mean, at least you understand the music.

Boya and Ziqi, two music talents in China.

One can interpret the other one's music exactly the first time they met.

That's a result of knowledge more than destiny.

There's never a lack of music enthusiastic in this world.

Even though today, when music is more and more entertainment-oriented,

you can find those shoulders trembling for classical music.

The songs top on ranking list, can still touch you deeply.

There's no denying that music is not only a way of entertainment for people. Many times we feel the willing and power inside us to understand the music. In other words, for those users of Music Player App, what they want is not only a tune with lyric, but also spiritual comfort and the satisfaction brought by understanding.

How does users understand a song?

People with strong curiosity will "study" a song. By "study" I mean that they will find out everything related to the music, for instance, its musician, album and background, etc. They will use search engines to get as much as they can. Why? For them, they need to understand it before truly enjoying it.

If there's such a music player App, which not only play the music for you, but also introduce the musician and stories behind in a natural way, would you want to have a try?

OK, welcome to UXer Talks, my friends. It's so nice to see you here. This time we have Watermoon here with us. He will talk about his music App design "Listen".

Listen --- This time, let's listen to the music carefully

"Now you have not a few of excellent music player Apps on your phone. Why you need another one? If so, how should it be?"

"I have strong curiosity. Every time I listen to a music, I want to know more about it. I believe that there are many people who are like me. For this reason, I made "listen"."

"From another perspective, when you listen to a song, if you can tell people the stories behind it immediately. That's a cool thing, right?"

Listen to music carefully, but in a simple way

"If there are some principles of being a product manager, I believe that one of the most important is, try to make your product simple. "listen" is exactly a very simple music player. Those with a tab bar at the bottom, serving as entrances to each feature page, will never be applied in listen. I want users get what they want as quick as possible."

Open Listen and you will find a song recommended to you on the first page. Music stories and backgrounds are below the Play button. Nothing else.

"If you like this song, click the heart icon to add it to your library. Don't like it? It doesn't matter. Slide up and there are some others for you."

It's rare to see such a scroll-able Play page in music player Apps now.

"I believe that the sliding gesture like this is the easiest. Much easier than clicking."

People want changes. They want the feeling of freshness.

"One feature of Listen I like most is that, the background image of the Play page is changing. The image selected is always related to the music being played."

"I want music and visual thing supplement each other, which contributes to the atmosphere and increases the feeling of immersion. As Listen only recommends those music with stories behind them to users, it's easy to get the appropriate images. In the following example, the player is playing Game of Thrones, a song from the TV series with the same name. I use the post as the background since it reflects the theme of this music: ruthless war and a fight for imperial hegemony"

Listen would add different visual effects to the background images. For example, the "game of thrones" is processed by Gaussian Blur. But for "Your name", it's better to adopt a fresh and lively style. It's easy to achieve this in coding stage. "