NIKHIL NAIR
Digital Collaboration in music
 Soundtrap/Spotify 

Contributions
Research
UX/UI
Prototyping

Team
Lead UX, Design & Prototyping (Myself)
Design support (Kajsa) 
Design critique (Central Design team)
Research (Myself, Marianne & Estelle)
Product managing (Sourabh P)
Product managing (Joakim P)
Engineering (Björn S)
Engineering (Pedro N)
Engineering (Song L)
Engineering (Johan)
Engineering (Jonas)
Engineering (Marcin)
Engineering manager (Ashleigh)

Soundtrap developed a fully collaborative environment for musicians to partner up in real time, on the same project. But in order to realise the benefits of this technical upgrade, significant updates had to be made to the UX within the studio. 


Collaboration was at the core of Soundtrap’s business. It helped drive the education product in schools while pushing positive usage patterns amongst consumers.






Making collaboration easy, effective and smooth. 





01

We distinguished between shared and private actions.

 









“Somebody muting my track while I’m working on it is extremely disruptive. I might quit Soundtrap if it keeps happening.”


- Research participant

We discovered that accidentally muting a track that someone else is also working on, is one of the most disruptive things to a smooth collaboration. It even brought upon the risk of users wanting to rage quit Soundtrap.




Approaches & iterations.

The final solution allows users to mute tracks without disrupting other collaborators.

Prototype demonstrating the final design solution.









02

We visualised every user’s position in real time. 

Exploration with pointers showing the users position.




Showing a user’s position in the project prevented others from accidentally overriding their work. 


The final solution had user tags appearing on the audio regions that were being worked on. It kept additional UI to a minimum – meaning no flying cursors, owing to the studio’s UI heavy interface. 

 
Chosen approach









03

We enabled commenting to raise the level of feedback and alignment between collaborators.









Outcome


These initiatives, spanning multiple quarters, resulted in an increase in collaboration requests, studio engagement metrics along with an increase in the  NPS. It was a necessary update that keeps Soundtrap relevant today.