Improving the User Experience of Mobile Collaborative Playlists User experience design factors of affordances and perception of control

Abstract

Music plays a significant role in people’s everyday life. Not only is music a major element of individual’s own activities but also in social activities. This has resulted in an uprising trend of multi-user music experience in audio streaming services. One of these social features are collaborative playlists. This kind of playlists can be simultaneously accessed and modified by multiple users and collaborative playlists are believed to enhance the social ambiance as well as to facilitate the discovery of music in the group. One of the biggest challenges when designing collaborative playlists is to cope with simultaneous users and various preferences they have while interacting with the same user interface. However, not many studies have been investigating these issues which resulted in the topic to be underexplored. The aim of this thesis project was therefore to identify user experience design factors in terms of affordances and perception of control in collaborative playlists designed for mobile phones. These design factors are complemented with a set of design guidelines that address the identified design challenges. To reach the project goal, this thesis followed an iterative user-centred design approach and was examined in the context of the industrial use case. Each step of the design process influenced the next steps with its collected insights and the final design concepts were validated with user tests. Based on the knowledge gained from the process, the design factors and guidelines were derived directly from the data collected through user studies.