Background

Apple Music for Business by PlayNetwork was a service which enabled retailers, restaurants, hotels and other public-facing establishments to play licensed music in their locations and provided curated playlists as well as custom music schedules that matched with individual venue brands and vibes.

Goal

To provide businesses with an integrated, self-serve tool to harness in-store audio messaging in their marketing strategy and directly communicate with their customers

Role

As the senior UX/UI designer, and project lead, I was responsible for:

• interviewing stakeholders, subject matter experts, and prospective end-users
• identifying and prioritising user segments
• creating integrated service wireflows
• researching and expanding upon Apple’s existing User Interface components and styles
• creating and delivering final User Interface designs to developers
• implementing components with behaviour documentation into the figma design system

Team

1 design manager
1 product manager
1 product analyst
1 production designer

6 MONTH TURN AROUND

DISCOVER

User Research

PlayNetwork offered an existing managed messaging service whereby Messaging Coordinators would use an internal tool in order to upload, tag, and schedule audio messages for enterprise customers.

4 client-facing Messaging Coordinators were asked to perform key tasks both inside and outside their current tool in order to gain the full-picture of their everyday responsibilities and processes.

In order to try to understand the processes and needs of Enterprise users — and since existing client interviews were not able to be performed — internal marketing subject-matter-experts and stakeholders in the sales team were interviewed.

A high-level view of the entire customer facing and web app journey was mapped out in order to understand all influencing factors of the user experiences.

DISCOVER

Findings

• The steps users had to take to create a program were incredibly complex, and not intuitive
• There were a number of additional features that had been tacked on to an MVP which required a number of work-arounds
• There was no way to see an overview of all information linked to a location, program, or campaign
• Every new program had to be created from scratch for each location as duplication or bulk actions were not possible
• The reporting system used to keep clients updated with programs was only available in csv format which was difficult for the client to understand

Time taken for Messaging Coordinators to create and schedule a single Messaging Program for one client:

4 hours

DEFINE

Scope

Card sorting exercises were held to inform a feature map and Information Architecture trees were created in order to map out North-Star features and then prioritise them according to bandwidth, engineer estimates, and
release deadlines.

The recommendation was to create the following main areas:

1. Messaging section within the main navigation that by default directs to a Messaging Campaign Dashboard
2. Program page with secondary navigation to see the Schedule, Targeted Locations and Report
3. Messaging Setup Wizard allowing users to set up and fine-tune their Programs
4. Message Library containing all uploaded audio messages
5. Details pages for messages, locations and location groups

MMP flow journeys were created in order to guide sitemap and wireframes.

IDEATE

User Experience

Wireframes were created, made into prototypes using inVision, and 6 unscripted usability sessions were held amongst target users, internal stakeholders, as well as by internal employees unfamiliar with the project.

Wireframes were adjusted according to the feedback, and presented to Apple for approval before being presented to the Product Analyst to begin writing Acceptance Criteria.

Pages and features were then broken down, components were scoped out and t-shirt sizing estimates were made based on component & organism complexity.

IDEATE

User Interface

External benchmarking was done on tools that each user segment may be familiar with: from ad-management and marketing campaign tools to CRM software.

Apple’s existing web and desktop products were explored to garner which existing components exist in the ecosystem that might serve our User Interface purposes. When components didn’t quite meet the user needs, new elements were presented alongside rationale and for introduction to Cupertino for approval.