Architektur Reiseführer
Das Projekt
Bei dem „Österreichischen Architektur Reiseführer“ handelt es sich um ein fiktives Schulprojekt, bei dem sowohl Konzeption, Gestaltung und Präsentation von mir übernommen wurden.
Das Ziel war es, wichtige architektonische Bauwerke des letzten Jahrzehnts vorzustellen und den Leser auf einer Reise quer durch Österreich zu begleiten.
Vision und Strategie
Der Projekt sollte nicht lediglich als Reisebegleiter wie ein herkömmlicher Reiseführer dienen, sondern auch während dem Lesen Spaß machen und durch die Gestaltung Lust auf die modernen Gebäude machen.
Planning & Scope Definition
I defined the product with my project manager partners. I evangelised customer goals and balanced business goals. I prioritised and negotiated features for launch and beyond.
Oversight & Coordination
I designed across and collaborated with seven platform designers and their PM partners to translate product features for each platform context.
Design Execution & Validation
I designed down on Kindle Fire, Android, iOS and the iOS mobile Digital Music Store. I executed journeys, wireframes, prototypes and design specs.
I designed up and presented works to gain buy‐in from executives, senior stakeholders and many other Amazon teams throughout the project lifecycle.
Three design composites showing the Prime Music section on Android Mobile. The designs show the ‚Songs‘, ‚Albums‘ and ‚Prime Playlist‘ sections.
The Challenge
Create Deeper Relationships with Customers
Since 2013, digital music download sales have declined and now a sizable proportion of the music industry’s revenue is made up by on‐demand streaming services. For Amazon, this signaled a rapid change in music consumption habits.
Our challenge was to evolve with customers and enter the highly competitive on‐demand streaming music segment in the U.S.
Prime Music would offer a limited selection of a million songs and catalogue titles (at least six months old), exclusive for Prime members to stream and download. With this new benefit we hoped to create deeper relationships with Amazon customers.
A grid of squares with logos of rdio, Spotify, iTunes Radio, Beats Music, Deezer, Pandora, Google Play and Rhapsody. Prime Music logo is in the center.
The Approach
Good Fast Cheap
In favor of speed to market, we were tasked to design and build Prime Music within the existing Digital Music Store and Music Library architecture. This tactic was perceived to be advantageous and the least riskiest.
The assumption was simple—millions of customers visit Amazon everyday. Extend the acquire, play, manage conceptual model that customers were familiar with and leverage the existing infrastructure to get to market sooner and cheaper.
This early architectural decision had a major impact on the quality of the customer experience we could both create and reconcile.
Rectangles displayed in step-like fashion connected by dots and lines. The picture depicts the sequential and dependent nature of the waterfall software development methodology.
Chasing Waterfalls
Feature design and development were broken into parallel workstreams for the Music Library and Digital Music Store. I led the design for all aspects related to the store.
Each feature phase of the project was serialised, starting with the design and development for the reference platform—Kindle Fire. Once each feature was designed and approved, the engineering team began the implementation.
I followed by working with platform designers to translate product features for their platform’s context. Concurrently, I would design the next feature in the pipeline, whilst also working with my own platform engineering teams to execute the current feature through to completion.
“The combination of a fixed launch date and aggressive scope created an intense environment with many coordination and time challenges.”
Working backwards from a fixed launch date, meant that design was subsumed into an engineering‐driven process. Sign‐off milestones were driven by engineering estimates and time to create the right design was the time left over. The combination of a fixed launch date and aggressive scope created an intense environment with many coordination and time challenges.
The Discovery
Customer Insights
We conducted customer and market research to drive our planning phase.
These are the key insights that defined the launch version of the product:
Simple graphic illustration of a person leaning back in chair. There is a music note emitting soundwaves in front of the person.
Lean‐back & Lean‐forward
The primary segments are customers that listen to spoon‐fed music and customers that actively control what they listen to.
Simple graphic illustration of a person sitting and reading. The person has headphones on.
Playlists Go With Activities
Customers listen to playlists to complement a mood or an activity such as relaxing, working‐out, cleaning or reading.
Simple graphic illustration of 6 squares with music notes to represent albums. One of the squares contains a love heart representing a favourite album.
Songs Remain The Same
Customers only listen to 19% of their own music library which consists mostly of catalogue songs, not albums.
Simple graphic illustration of a piggy bank
Streaming To Save
Price sensitivity was the motivating factor for customers switching to on-demand streaming services.
Simple graphic illustration of records composed into the shape of a triangle play button.
Collectors Listen More
Paid‐tier customers invest more into building their libraries and stream music four times as much.
Simple graphic illustration of a stack of albums with a tick badge sitting on top of one.
Show me You Know Me
Customers expect Amazon to know them and serve personalised music recommendations.
The Vision
One Million Songs, Free For You
Our vision for Prime Music was to be the best value music service for Amazon customers, not a me‐too on‐demand streaming service.
We did not want to offer an exhaustive catalog of songs, rather wanted to focus on helping customers discover music they’ll love, from a selection of music they will actually listen to.
Our customers expect and trust us to know them. We envisioned the future of the music service to be deeply personalised to customers‘ music tastes.
Seven circles of varying sizes representing genres in popularity order. The order is Pop, Rock, Alternative and Indie, Country, Christian and Gospel, Hip-hop and classical.
Together with 2‐Day free shipping, unlimited streaming of popular movies and TV shows, access to more than 500,000 free ebooks, and unlimited photo storage—Prime Music would make Amazon Prime one of the best deals in the history of shopping.
Value is what we wanted customers to shout about.