Building a poll feature to enhance engagement between hosts and their growing number of listeners
Stationhead challenges the traditional radio model by allowing anyone to stream their own radio show using their voice and choice of music through Apple Music and Spotify account integration to stream music directly from the Stationhead app.
I created a poll feature to help hosts decide what direction to take their live show to fully immerse their audience with real-time results.
To challenge designing within the parameters of an established design system, Designlab tasked students to create a new feature for an existing app.
With the rise of audio focused social apps, Stationhead caught my attention. Stationhead provides music lovers a place to convene and interact with one another to create a unique shared listening experience.
Research needed to be done to find out what new feature would further enhance the hosting and listening experience on Stationhead while being competitive to the burgeoning number of social audio apps offering different features.
I conducted an audit of the app to familiarize myself with the app flow, current features and design patterns. I also hosted my own station to compare the differences with being a listener.
Upon opening the app, the home screen shows all the stations on air that one can join as a listener. If a user wants to host their own station, they must click on their user icon first and then choose to go on air.
The feature used the most during a live show appeared to be the chat function that takes up more than half of the screen which I noticed can be difficult to keep up with as more listeners join the station.
In comparison to apps where audio is an added feature to an established app like Twitter or Discord, Stationhead is built around listening to music through linking existing music streaming services.
Stationhead features weren’t as varied compared to competitors that allowed users to share their screens, enable transcriptions and create polls at the same time.
To identify any pain points and opportunities, I conducted a mix of user interviews and an online survey.
The 6 user interviews and 16 survey responses confirmed that the chat moving too fast as the amount of listeners grew was an issue for both hosts and listeners:
Using the How Might We method, I brainstormed solutions to answer:
I decided to focus on a poll feature since it is transactional between the host and listener with the host narrowing down what feedback they’re looking for as they set up a poll, while the listener can choose an option and see their opinion taken into account in the results.
To help guide me in what frames I needed to design, I created and referred to the task flow for a host to create a new poll starting on the host’s home screen.
Similar to how hosts can easily add or remove songs during a live show, I aimed for the same flexibility when creating a poll.
Positioned just below the current features a host can choose from now sat a ‘Create Poll’ button. To create a poll, hosts simply needed to pose a question, add up to 4 options and set the duration. Once the poll is live, hosts can edit the duration or delete the poll altogether.
With limited real estate on the live show page and the chat taking up a little more than half the screen, it was a challenge to find a way to integrate the poll without sacrificing readability. Several sketches and wireframes later, I opted to scale down and push the chat to the bottom and have the poll front and center.
Since this is a new feature, it was important to utilize Stationhead’s signature black and red color scheme to acclimate hosts creating a poll for the first time.
The new poll feature was tested by 6 existing hosts and 4 listeners on a functional prototype where they asked listeners: What is the best break-up song?
100% of participants successfully created and edited the poll with ease.
40% of participants, 3 listeners and 1 host, flagged the positioning and size of the poll in the context of a real, live show.
Although the poll feature was supposed to help with the chat moving too fast, the current size of the poll reduced the chat to three messages and essentially rendered it useless.
To remedy, an ellipsis icon was added to give users the option to hide and collapse the poll.
Stationhead grew exponentially during the pandemic as people found alternative ways to connect with music. I chose to add a poll feature to help hosts further interact with their listeners and strengthen the communities formed on the app.
To determine user pain points and reinforce I was solving for the right problem, I conducted user interviews and ran a survey with existing users. I applied those learnings to design and test various poll feature concepts to come to my final conclusion.
Stationhead users who tested out the prototype had the following thoughts:
“having a poll like this will help with the chaos when artists host a listening party where there are tens of thousands of listeners”
“a poll is so much easier than asking a question and having answers lost in the chat”
Testing the poll feature on existing hosts was extremely useful to see if it worked as intended but the next step will be to solely test on listeners to see if it seamlessly integrates with their listening experience on Stationhead.
