Context 

I joined the team in 2016. The project started brewing in 2017. The problem statement is simple enough: How might we provide a seamless and personalized streaming experience to our audience?

Research

As part of the in-house team, we worked closely with a research agency during this phase.  There were a series of interviews with core audiences, followed by a synthesis session where we download things in post-its, with groupings, ideation and labeling.

As a person who lives in New York, doesn't drive, and has very specific musical tastes, some of the key learnings were very surprising to me. For example, most people we spoke to use music as background. They listen while driving, making dinner, or at work. They don't actively engage in picking artists or albums, instead relying on DJ’s curations

Design

We started with the foundation - mapping out core experience, including,

• How do people navigate and react to personalized content

• How do people discover various types of content 

• How do people pick up where they left off 

• How do we populate content relevant to what people are listening to now 

• How does it work for new vs existing subscribers 

Meanwhile, we audited all the content types, made templates, and baked them into part of the core Sketch library.

I was part of 2 designers working on mobile devices, to bring the core experience to life with production-ready designs and annotations. The team worked closely together to maintain consistency across all platforms.  During the design phase, I also led several user testings on iconography, interface variations and feature usability. The insights gained from these tests guided us through further iterations. Prior to the roll out, we also sat side by side ( quite literally) with the front end team during VQA.

I left SiriusXM in May 2018, right after we launched in the app store. 🎉 It felt really good to work on something start to finish, see the product, and read the reviews. I got to work with with some amazing designers and design leaders, and I felt I was ready to take a deeper dive in the music space.