DONGCI
A Music-Oriented Short Video-Sharing App
Dongci
Dongci is a Chinese music-oriented short video-sharing app launched in Jan 2018. It currently has 2,000,000 registered users and 200,000 daily active users.
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Short video apps are popular in China (e.g. TickTok) and become a competitive market. Dongci distinguishes itself
by focusing on the musical communities and providing
multi-frames video experience.
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Duration
8-weeks, 2019 Spring
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My Role - Product Design, Visual Design, Researcher
Mainly contributed to user research, prototyping, usability testing, and visual design. Led iteration also participated in ideation.
Overview
Dongci is a Chinese music-oriented short video-sharing app launched in Jan 2018.
We redesigned the collaboration funtion of Dongci. Add Studio function for both professional and general user and Events section to increas user engagment.
Discovery
Get insights to better define the problem.
What do Dongci users need? And, how do we gratify those user needs?
Business Challenge
Although Dongci found its signature features - the musical atmosphere and multi-screen experience, it was still having its own problems. Our task was pretty straightforward, Dongci wanted more user engagement and a higher retention rate.
Music Focus Engagement Participation
Current App Analysis
We explore the current app to get an overview of the whole user flow and functions of Dongci
Findings
By analyzing current user flow, we found that users are not really playing and creating music collectively:
- Although it’s trying to promote the idea of play together, Dongci hasn’t made full use of the ‘Join’ feature. Users tend to ignore that feature as an opportunity to collaborate with others.
- Dongci has no reward mechanism that encourages users to engage in content creation.
- People are not prompted to use the app to create new contents. They tend to just watch other people’s work instead of participating.
Challenge: How to turn passive use of watching and commenting on contents to active participation and collaboration?
Usability Test
The goal is to better understand how users interact with Dongci and to see problems when users use the original version
Do not want to show the real world
It's noisy that too much content show on one page
No filming tutorial
Don't have many professional functions
The co-posts function is not obvious
No teamwork option
Can't search by songs and music type
Seek bar is hard to control
The form of comments is barely satisfactory
The Remix button is not obvious
User Research
We identified two kinds of key users of Dongci through business insights and exploring the app, and conducted survey and interviews separately.
We identified two kinds of key users of Dongci through business insights and exploring the app, and conducted survey and interviews separately.
Musicians
They are music professionals who want to show off their musical skills and gifts. They are the group who currently contribute the majority of contents on DongCi. For them, Dongci is a platform on which they hope to make their names known, showcase their skills and make friends who can play music together.
General users
They are music fans that have few music work creation. The quality of their posts are perceived less professional and attractive compared to musicians.They see Dongci as a place to have fun and kill time. Also,they’d like to use Dongci as channel to share musical experiences with each other.
Survey
Meanwhile, we created an online survey to ask people directly what purpose for using Dongci.
The top three purposes showed below.
Meanwhile, we created an online survey to ask people directly what purpose for using Dongci.
The top three purposes showed below.
Interview
We did interviews after usability testing. We interviewed both normal users and professional users. Basically, we confirmed the needs identified before, while a new inspiration was noticed. One of our interviewers is an independent musician and musical instrument shop owner. He mentioned that Dongci could help him gain more fans and promote his business. He wants to have a function that can help him compose music with more musicians in the future.
Key Personas
We identified 2 kinds of key users of Dongci through business insights and exploring the app. After organizing our survey findings and user interviews of these 2 kinds of users, we extracted main characteristics and similarities to create 2 key personas to help us with design decisions in our ideate and design stages.
Define
Our target aim is to increase more new user engagement and not losing professional musician users at the same time.
Affinity Diagram
We used Affinity Diagram as a way to reveal current usability issues and to understand user needs. By consolidating research data, we identified key insights and potential opportunities
How might we enable users to collaborate better with each other?
Design Principles
Derived from the user research findings and business goal,
we extracted design principles that guided us through our designs.
Professional
Dongci's professional music community stand out from the other short video sharing platforms. The product should remain its professional focus on music.
Engaging
Musicians engage people with their work. The contents and features in Dongci should always aim to keep users engaged.
Sociable
In order to grow the Dongci music community as a whole and help users grow as individuals, the product should encourage users to connect and communicate with each other.
Unique
Dongci believes music is a way to share people’s feelings and believes, and every one is unique and creative. The product should help users to join and show their own perspective.
Ideate
Follow the insights and opportunities, we do brainstorming about ideas for functions what users really want.
Brainstorming
We conducted a few brainstorming sessions to come up with ideas to solve the HMW –
How might we enable users to collaborate better with each other?
Introducing Studio
Studio is a private room for users to collaborate and get feedbacks at the early stage of music creation, which aim to trigger more interactions among users.
It could help general users like Sarah to get help from friends and trusted musicians to create music piece that she is more comfortable sharing online,
and enable musicians like Kenny to collaborate with musician from other places.
Studio Flow
• Set up a new Studio project and invite friends
• Talk to collaborators
• Record new tracks
• View feedback from collaborators
• Compose the final piece.
Start a Collaboration 1.0
PRO:
• easy to implement
• works into the current flow
CON:
• hidden feature, easily missed
• require the user to publish unfinished work
• not flexible for multiple-user collaboration
Start a Collaboration 2.0 - Studio
PRO:
• support multiple-user collaboration
• encourage real collaboration during the process
• enable general users to get help and feedbacks to polish their work for publishing
• addressed the privacy concerns
CON:
• complex features that are harder to implement
• will need more effort to educate users for the new feature
Team
Problem: Users could only interact with each other after content is fully produced. Even though they can use the remix function to collaborate, it lacks the real sense of collaboration when they are making the music.
Approach: The Team concept is introduced as one of the key element for Studio. Building a team in the studio enables users to engage each other at an early stage of content creation and get advised by trusted friends and musicians.
Track
Problem: The Draft feature in Dongci is temporary with limited features. There are no ways for users to share their work in process with friends to get feedback before posting to the public.
Approach: The Track feature in Studio serves as a temporary gallery for group members to view and give feedback to each other without posting it in public.
Update
Problem: The current users could only interact with each other under the comment sections when the music piece is posted or remix existing music work. Musicians mentioned that they have to talk and share files with collaborators in other messenger apps such as WeChat. They need a centralized place to communicate.
Approach: We aim to create a private space for users to collaborate. The Update section combines the feature of
a chatroom and new update of the group.
Easy setup
Users may easily set up and invite friends to collaborate on their exciting new project.
Work in process sharing
Record and share work in process in Studio. Viewable only to group members to help users get feedback and help from trust friends before sharing their work to the public.
Compose and publish
Enjoy playing music with friend and get ready for the masterpiece. Compose the final piece with the best version of their work and with the help of friends and musicians they like.
Usability Test & Iterations
The goal for the usability test is to check if users can understand our new features.
We have asked 8 users to join our test.
Invite Friends
Invite Friends
Reflection
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What did I learn from this project?
Finding user needs is always a key for making design decisions. Needs are always there, people need the media to satisfy those needs, if this medium cannot do it, users would not stop searching gratifications, they just move on to other media.
By making prototypes, including failed ones, I learned how to separate my own perspective from the real needs of users.
What I enjoy the most is talking with the users. I think empathizing is harder than it sounds; I enjoy the moment when the person lets me understand through their perspective what they want, what they need, what they are struggling with. That's what makes me love being a UX/UI designer.
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What can be done in the future?
Since the time was so tight for us, a lot of features are still needed to be thought over further. I will add the "Live Video Chat" function for "Studio".
After the user invites their friends to the studio, they can do live video chat if their friends online.
However, every product is a process, every small point could be a direction to work on.