Vwaza Case study

Vwaza Music

Role

UX Researcher
UX / UI Designer

Goal

Redesign the current mobile app and website (with a web player) that provides a seamless and delightful experience.

Duration

4 weeks

What is Vwaza?

It is a website that serves as a web player and also has a corresponding mobile app where users from around the world can buy and stream African music and poetry.

The first step is always to empathise with the user, and so I conducted interviews with a group of 10 people that fell within Vwaza's target market.

After these interviews, I created user personas and empathy maps to properly understand their wants, needs and frustrations.

User Personas

After each interview, I took pieces of our findings and created personas that describe different users, their personalities, their pain, and their goals.

The key challenges

After testing out the app and website myself, and carrying out usability tests with 10 other users on the old mobile app & website, I found there were a few key problems:

Pain point 1

The search function was proven useless as results were not showing up even though the content exists on the app.

Pain point 2

There was a lack of contrast on the app and users were having difficulty reading certain pages.

Pain point 3

The website's landing page did not effectively explain what Vwaza was about.

Pain point 4

The layout of the content was difficult for users to understand where to start from.

Empathy map

Even though I was in constant motion geared towards solving the user problems, I needed to put myself in the user’s shoes. From the data I got from the user interviews, I wrote down all of the responses on sticky notes and began to cluster them on an Empathy map. Clustering interview responses allowed me to picture the problem as one large entity and solve the problems more succinctly.

I then made digital versions of the empathy maps.

Hypothesis:

During the ideation phase (aided by the empathy maps) I built solution hypotheses for all user research findings, every unanswered question, all design decisions, and how they would solve a customer problem. From these hypotheses I rendered a user journey map that helped me visualise the solution.

After ideating, I then tried to figure out what the mood statement for Vwaza was going to be, the colour scheme to use that resonated with the brand colours, as well as the iconography.

I then went on to prototyping wireframes (from paper to digital) and created a lo-fi prototype in order to see the motion UI of certain elements and to ensure user experience was not hindered in performing basic tasks. From there, I created a hi-fi prototype.

The same prototyping process was repeated for the web player / website. Wireframes --> lo-fi prototype --> hi-fi prototype. Iterations were made to wireframes and prototypes after several tests (which is the final step in my design process).

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