Later in my employment at Moodagent, I worked as part of the design team on redesigning the core mood-based playlisting feature.
This work resulted in Mood Radios — continuously playing radio stations with configurable adjustments by the user.
I was responsible for the overall product design.
Challenge
The design of the Moodagent mood-based playlisting feature was originally based around on-device audio files. In a sense, the feature functioned as "filters" for sorting personal music libraries.
As Moodagent changed from working on local files to a full featured music streaming service, the feature remained the same, but now utilising a vast music catalogue.
The feature was then due for a redesign, with the goal of being more aligned with modern, lean-back music consumption trends, such as continuously playing stations.
Balancing "lean in" vs. "lean back".
A core challenge of the redesign was the balance between engaged and active interaction (lean in) vs. a passive consumption (lean back).
User research showed that some users found it difficult to understand the mood-based controls for adjusting playlist generation, which led to some rarely using the feature.
This led to us to using what we called "Modes", which were a collection of hand-picked (by musicologist) combinations of easily selectable mood configurations, essentially collapsing down the choice for the user.
Keeping fine-tuning
Since some users were fond of using the fine-grained adjustments for finding the right music, we kept a specific "Tune"-mode. When selected, this opened a modal-screen with tempo-selection, mood-sliders, and a preview showing what music the user could expect from this configuration.
Station covers
I also designed covers for Editorial Radio Stations to be displayed wherever they were represented in the App. The main goal with these was to help the user understand "what do I get by selecting this?" to increase usage and usability.
Outcome
The updated feature was implemented as part of a relaunch of the Moodagent app as it transitioned from a B2C focus into a white-label solution.