Foundational Research for Browser Playlist that Shifted Company Culture
A research project to learn how people use, share, and find content for playlist products.
Uncover user needs, goals, expectations, and use-cases for playlist products.
Project Scope
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Client: Brave, a browser startup
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Timeframe: 5 weeks
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My Role: UX Researcher
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Team: UX Researcher, Supervisor, VP of Design, Lead PM, Engineering, Lead Designer, Sr. Director of UX
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Methods: In-depth User Interviews, Observation of User Tasks
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Tools: Dovetail, Google Sheets, Userlytics
High-Level Timeframe
The Problem
Brave did not talk to users before launching Brave Playlist iOS, a product that allows users to create a playlist using audio and video media.
Development of Playlist Android and Playlist Desktop (both publicly announced) had not yet begun, so leadership wanted to know what people expect and need from a playlist product.
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Additionally, Playlist products are visioned to compete against heavy-hitters like YouTube. Therefore, the product team wanted to understand current pain-points using playlists on YouTube.
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This was the first foundational research study conducted at the company, and I took ownership for the research on day 4 of my internship.
Assumptions and Hypotheses
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Users use playlists while multitasking, often in the background, therefore video for Playlist Desktop can be low-priority.
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Users value syncing playlists across platforms (desktop and mobile).
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Users experience pain-points (i.e. account switching, ads, no downloading content) with YouTube, creating an opportunity to innovate.
Research Questions
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How do people use YouTube for playlists?
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What pain-points do people have with playlist products?
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How important is the concept of syncing between desktop and mobile?
My Role
I was the UX Research lead in charge of:
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Stakeholder interviews
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The expedited time-frame meant I had only 15 minute meetings to uncover stakeholder needs and goals for the product.
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Creating research plan
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Recruiting participants
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Moderating sessions
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Analyzing data
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Creating deliverable and presenting to team
Methodology
To meet the urgent deadline, I decided that remote In-depth User Interviews combined with a short Usability Task would gain high-level insights on schedule. In-depth interviews provided details into how participants conceptualized playlist products and "why" they interact with them while usability tasks provided "how".
On day 4 of the internship, I started by conducting stakeholder interviews with key team-members: Lead PM, Lead Designer, Sr. Director of UX, Lead Engineer, and VP of Design. After conducting the interviews, I analyzed their responses and formulated a research plan to address the most critical questions.
Due to the need for a quick turnaround, I aimed to interview 6 diverse participants that matched our target profile and lead a share-out of key findings within 5 weeks.
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During the study sessions, I invited the stakeholders to observe and to Slack me additional questions in real time. This made the research project a team effort and increased stakeholder buy-in.
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Recruitment: I developed a screener survey to ensure a wide-variety of participant profiles (i.e. mix of playlist products on desktop, use YouTube playlists, whether or not they access playlists cross-devices). I recruited 6 total participants, however 1 had poor internet connection and was not included in the final study.
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Remote Moderation: We used Userlytics to recruit and conduct our remote interviews. Their participant panel sped up recruitment while allowing me to use our custom screener survey. I independently created the Interview Guide including: expectation setting, rapport building, primary interview (non-leading open-ended questions), and observation task rubric (find content, create a new playlist, add content to playlist).
Breaking down the process
For analysis I used Dovetail to analyze the interview responses and usability tasks using affinity diagrams and thematic coding.
Major Learnings
Playlists are both for multitasking and a form of entertainment
Some people use playlists to aid their attention while multitasking, while others use them as a form of entertainment at the same level as watching TV and requiring a separate monitor.
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This indicates the need for a playlist product with wide functionality, not simply background play as the team assumed.
Users need to access playlist content across mobile and desktop.
When asked, participants didn't realize that not being able to access their content across devices was even an option. This trend was overwhelming confirmed as more interviews were conducted.
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This was a strong signal that the team needed to build a playlist product that connected with other platforms.
Users did not have expected pain-points with playlists on YouTube.
The team assumed YouTube would have certain pain-points (account system, ads, downloading content), informing the MVP. Users did not find these assumed pain-points to be problematic in their daily lives, but identified a few opportunities, such as iOS/Windows friction.
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This suggest a refocus on product-value is vital for a successful launch.
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Impact
The team immediately aligned towards making Playlist Desktop communicate with Playlist iOS and Playlist Android, to meet user expectations and needs.
Other teams saw the value in avoiding the financial and time cost by conducting foundational research, leading to an increase in generative research requests across the company.
Throughout the 2 weeks of collecting and analyzing the data, I took the initiative to share key insights into the weekly design meetings. According to the VP of Design:
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"Insights are actually the only thing I am certain I want to hear about at every design meeting. Serious... They need to form our product design decisions as often as possible".
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Lessons Learned
Stakeholder alignment is key and saves time.
Due to the compressed timeline for the study, I was forced to have individual stakeholder sessions (15-30mins) without a group sync. One of the stakeholders felt that their goals weren't completely addressed and they ended up questioning the value of the Playlist project entirely.
For the next project I lead, I will prioritize having a sync meeting with the key stakeholders together to collectively align on the study goals.
One project can shift company culture
One study can help shift company culture. The impact of this was conveyed by the VP of Design:
"I feel strongly that the company is seeing the value of what the UR team is doing and your contribution has been a key part of this, and will help us grow the team now. So thank you for your great work!"