Genre Station tool, Pandora
Genre stations are a core feature in Pandora’s listening experience. In an effort to leverage this feature, we needed better tools for Pandora’s Curators to manage and create these stations at scale. This project was an opportunity for me to reimagine this experience.
My Role
Lead product designer
Worked Closely with: Design partner, Product Manager, Design Manager
Original internal tools
These are screenshots of the original Genre Station tools that Curators use to program stations based on historical radio sequencing models.
Design principles
Alive
Evolving, ever-changing, living programs that grow with the latest music trends
Flexible
Accommodating for different curators’ needs based on the Genre of expertise
Story-telling
Tool should support Curators’ need to craft narratives
Anatomy
After spending time with the original tools and interviewing curators to understand their goals and pain-points, I proposed a system for how we could achieve a clearer station UX. I enjoyed coming up with the below nomenclature to help create a shared vocabulary. The below diagram served as a starting point for the following explorations.
Initial explorations & features:
Color coded
Time Labels
Editing sequences
Ability to remove and add track codes
Ability to add an infinite amount of fragments
Hover states
Drag and Drop to modify
Order of Track Codes
Testing
Making adjustments to the genre station sequence is an impactful action because it dictates the flow of a listener's experience. We explored different methods to introduce friction as a way to ensure commitment.
I thought this was an opportunity for a simple A/B test.
Test A: Edit Workspace
My initial hypothesis was adding an 'Edit' CTA which required the curator to enter into an 'edit mode' and explicitly save their changes.
Test B: Flat Workspace
The 'flat' approach allows the the curator to make a change directly to the control module without going into an explicit 'edit mode'.
This approach ended up being more desirable for curators since the ‘edit mode’ felt cumbersome and unnecessary. However, I wanted to prevent against accidentally changing the order, so I introduced a confirmation dialog as a compromise.
Refinement
We were able to prioritize features and fine-tune bits of the experience. It was important to clearly show the metadata needed for Curators to make informed decisions, such as status, edit time-stamps. We learned about the need to have a ‘scratch-pad’, so created a ‘Workspace’ bucket. I also had to account for constraints such as a meter that captures # of artists, albums, and tracks. This helps to ensure a diverse spectrum of music even within one genre station.
Station Preview
This was one of the most fun features to work on because it really elevated the experience of building a station. The goal was to allow curators to get a sense of the listeners’ experience.
This features does what you might expect: Generates preview of station based on their collection of tracks. Additionally, it provides a ‘composition’ of each bucket category. I carried over the Sequence flow so that as each song plays, they see the respective track code activate.