Transitioning Pandora from radio to on-demand listening
Pandora is well-known as a music discovery platform, providing a highly-personalized listening experience to approximately 60 million users each month for over a decade. The company faced fierce competition over the years with competing streaming platforms, and as a result, Pandora’s usage sharply declined.
The business began to partner with large artists and brands to promote on-demand listening and brand relevancy. These partnerships would allow household names to recommend music and create playlists. To support these partnerships and expand on-demand listening, I led the redesign of artist profiles.
Challenges
Low usage of artist pages
Pandora listeners are familiar with creating radio stations from artists and songs they love. Artists are the most searched and visited profile on the platform, however, only 44% of users landing on artist pages scroll down through the content. The “Top Songs” feature had less than 5% usage per month.
Limited capabilities in components
Artist profiles contain components for listening to the artist’s discography and discovering similar artists. The existing design didn’t have the housing capability for playlists created by the artist, content the artist is featured on, or any exclusive content to Pandora. These pages were also not scaled for curatorial partners or special partnerships.
“It would be great when curator profiles are populated – both on the Walt Disney Records and Hollywood Records – so we can take full advantage of our significant social following and support. Since we’re a unique brand, this will also enable Disney fans to more easily find other playlists that may interest them (we have over 30 on Pandora).
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Approach
Component distinctions
There was a lot of sameness within the content and the rows on the artist profiles pages. The lack of hierarchy created little emphasis on the page, leading to minimal interest for listeners to explore the page. To create content hierarchy and emphasis, I redesigned the components and made section headers accessible.
Header explorations to increase artist presence
User research uncovered that listeners were mistakenly routing to song pages from the artist profiles due to poor row designs. Shorter row heights increased user engagement particularly in IOS listeners, and row styles with a play button performed worse than the row style without a play button on both platforms. The row styles on existing artist profiles were designed to provide two options, which caused many navigational issues. I proposed a unique song row component to eliminate double navigation and confusion.
Content stacking
As Pandora continued to partner with high profile artists, the team added additional content types called “Only on Pandora” and “Collaborations.” The business pushed for “Only on Pandora” pinned at the top of artist profiles, with the assumption that users were guaranteed to be interested in this content. In reality, listeners often visited artist profiles when first discovering them. It was important to balance an artist’s discography and their partnership content for loyal vs. new listeners. To design a content stacking logic that pleased all listeners, my team and I created a framework that illustrated how content was perceived on artist profiles.
Scaling to curators and podcasters
To ensure that the design of artist pages were scalable to diverse talent types, I pushed for dynamic and flexible pages, with components having the ability to be rearranged and added depending on user, business and curatorial needs. Due to scoping and limited flexibility, our solution consisted of having one unique artist profile and four unique curator profiles (artists, curators, brands, record labels, and podcast publishers).
Solution
More than radio
By building a stronger artist presence on the page, designing distinct components for different content types, and adding paths of discovery, listeners could finally experience Pandora for more than just radio. The new profile’s ability to house more content types also allowed Pandora to expand partnerships with diverse talent types, expanding outside just music.
Thank you!
I hope you enjoyed viewing this project ☺