Slacker Radio is an online music streaming service available in the US and Canada. Listeners can access the service on the web and through mobile apps on multiple smartphones. It allows users to create and share customized music stations.
The Problem
Slacker knew their potential users were interested in the ability to create and share customized music stations. However, few were willing to create an account with them to do so when accessing from mobile.
Slacker was determined to have their users create an account but didn't know how to encourage them to do so when the user didn't see value in the product before the account creation process.
Customizing your radio
Upon landing on Slacker Radio's mobile welcome page for the first time, the user is greeted by two options, "get started for free," if they don't have an account, and "sign in," if they do. Assuming the user has not created an account on a different device, the next page will throw the user directly into the custom radio experience, allowing them to search for their favorite artists, adding as many as they'd like from a smart search, depending on how tailored they want their station to start out.
Selecting by smart search
If the user has trouble remembering their favorite bands on the spot, they can choose to "customize by genre" or "customize by decade," both of which will bring the user to a page where they can select as many of the respective options as they'd like to tailor their station to.
Selecting by genre
Show them the value and let them decide
The Solution
With mobile streaming being a pivotal feature of any radio service, having your users churn on the first page they encounter, asking them to create an account, won't work.
I believe that, rather than telling their users to blindly trust that taking the time to create an account will pay off, they should show them why it will and let them decide for themselves that account creation will benefit their mobile radio experience.
The design must flow
While brainstorming for this project, I took time to teach myself the DOT language needed to use GraphViz, a graph visualization program. Using those commands, I generated this chart of what I would propose as the new and improved Slacker Radio new user flow.
The following image is a very rough, immediate sketch of my initial thoughts, which you've seen refined and iterated upon above.
Initial thoughts and sketches
The first thing I did was research the mobile welcome and signup process that Slacker currently deployed and compared it to the two giants they stood against, Spotify and Pandora. The goal was to find a way for the user to get straight to Slacker's unique customization process faster than any of their competition, and to do that, I cut out three of their five initial steps, leaving only the product's experience and allowing the user to decide if it was valuable enough to sign up for, which, before using the actual product, they decided it wasn't. Until now.
