To gain insight on our competitors, we have decide to conduct two different research methods in order to organize our thoughts. Our main methods of research were Competitive Analysis and Heuristic Evaluation.
Demographic: Our demographic would include any avid music enjoyer. Our demographic is very broad because our product can list such a wide variety of music; that it would be impossible to narrow it down to a specific target audience. Since most people listen to music, this product could be beneficial to almost all of society, especially those who would use it in a social media way.
| Product | Strengths | Weaknesses | Quality Level | Price/Cost | Platform | |—|—|—|—|—|—| | Tiktok | Large User Base, Access to non popular artists/creators that you wouldn’t hear through other sources | Snippets may not always include music | High: Quality interface with usable technology | None | Web and Mobile App | | Spotify | - Large Database of songs - High definition audio | - No unreleased / underground - Only released by a major label or spotify program | High: Quality songs with licensed music | Free Version and Paid Membership | Mobile, Web, Smart Devices, and Game Consoles | | Shazam | - Will list similar songs that you have searched on the app - Will let a user play a popular snippet of commonly known songs | Usability of the main function (recognizing songs) is based on how good the microphone and speaker playing the music is | High | None | Mobile and Web |
Initial MVP - Our initial goal for the first sprint is to be able to stream a snippet of a popular song from a list. The snippet would be around 7 seconds long in order to determine whether or not the user likes or dislikes the song.
Competitor - Our main competitor would be Shazam: Music Discovery. They display similar features that warrant them to be our main competitor.
The only way to be notified of updates is through the app store, there is no way to check any update notes within the app. However, the update notes that are written do keep the user updated on what has changed.
Everything is pretty much easily understandable and straightforward. There is one button for Apple Music/Spotify which is not exactly clear on what it does.
The app allows a fair amount of user control and freedom when navigating through the app. Everything is clearly marked whether it is an x button or cancel.
It falls within all of the consistency and standards of other streaming apps so there should be no trouble trying to learn how to navigate through the app.
There is good communication between errors between the product and the consumer. There would be a pop-up notification that tells the user what the problem is.
The UI of the app is easy to navigate and very simple. It doesn’t have any information that clutters the screen and makes it overwhelming to have to navigate.
The ease of use is relatively the same for both a novice user and an experienced one. There really is not much difference, the app overall is still really easy to navigate and use.
The overall design of the app is great, minimalist and straightforward. There is the main function which is the song recognizer and a list of music that is trending. However, you do have to scroll down quite a bit to be able to reach some of the songs that are not visible at first glance and the main interface when opening is to find music by recognition rather than showing music that users have already discovered.
The app will help users recognize the problem, however they will often not tell you how to solve the problem and recover from the error.
There is a clearly labeled help button in the support section in the settings. This will link you to a page where there is a whole multi-page manual on how to navigate the app, use certain features, and copyright information.
From the information that we have gathered from our Competitive Analysis, we observed that not that many apps over the same kind of service that we will be providing to our users. There are some applications that have some similar features, however they do not offer the same method of finding new music for consumers. Here are our findings from the data that we have gathered.
Moving to our Heuristic Evaluation, the competitor we determined that Shazam would be our biggest competitor. We based our evaluation against their interface to determine where their strengths and weaknesses lie. By doing this we can determine what areas we can improve upon in our design. There were a lot of positives about Shazam, however we discovered that there were some areas that could have been improved upon.
While Song Snippet may not have as many competitors who offer the same service as us. We can capitalize on this by making an appealing service that can appeal to such a wide variety of users. It will be challenging to compete with well known services that have already established such a massive user base. Knowing this we still believe that our product can rival top apps such as Spotify and Shazam.
Our goal is to make finding music more accessible to users who do not want to spend hours upon hours listening to songs to find songs that they enjoy. From our standpoint, we are offering a service that, while currently available to some degree, is more convenient and accessible to users who want to discover new music in a timely manner. Using the data we gathered, we can determine what areas we should be focusing on in order to make our app more appealing and helpful to users.
A glaring caveat that we have encountered is user data. While we have observed our own interactions with other apps, we have yet to gather data from outside users and record their own personal interactions. With this we can see what areas we could improve upon where those apps have been seen as lackluster. Gathering more user data and opinions from outside sources would be very beneficial to see what users would want and expect from an app such as Song Snippet.