How might we create an experience that helps businesses control the music in their space?
What is Rockbot?
Rockbot is a streaming media platform that provides background music solutions for businesses, tailor-made to suit the vibe of the space and enhance the guests’ experience.
What was the challenge?
Build a dashboard experience that gives the user, total control of the background music at their business location.
My Role
Since I was one of the only two designers on the Rockbot team, I was the sole person on the dashboard redesign project. As such, I owned the design process, reporting to our CTO Ketu Patel with design systems guidance from Cavan Riley. Our CEO Garrett Dodge was the approver and was updated once a week on the project.
Impact
The dashboard eased a lot of friction points that were revealed during the research phase. Solving for ease in sign-in and ease in reporting explicit songs saw a rise in positive reviews from users. In the product evaluation that followed 6 months after the launch, 89% of the clients had a favorable view of the product. 82% said the new product addressed their concerns.
TEAM Garrett Dodge, Ketu Patel, Cavan Riley, Shantanu Salgaonkar
Image on Cover:
The Dashboard app
Rockbot was founded in 2009 by Garrett Dodge and Ketu Patel as a digital jukebox product for businesses like restaurants and bowling alleys. At that time the company had a very consumer driven focus. Over the years, Garrett and Ketu found a growing need for personalized music in modern brick-n-mortar businesses. Small business owners and admins at local restaurants wanted control over the music playing at their locations. Hence the need to create a user friendly dashboard that allows users to control, report and automate the music at their locations.
Left: CEO Garrett Dodge (left) and CTO Ketu Patel, Founders of Rockbot at their office in Oakland.
I structured the research program into user interviews and contextual inquiry.
The aim of this discovery session was to define the problem space for which we need to find our solution/s.
Right: images from the design sprint and brainstorming sessions at Rockbot.
User interview
Contextual Inquiry
Cavan and I divided the list of clients and cold called them asking if they would like to be interviewed about their routine for a $50 gift card. Our interviews were structured as conversational to put the users at ease and get more genuine responses.
Cavan and I shadowed some of the clients (that volunteered) for an entire day observing them in their typical environment going about their day. We stayed inconspicuous and observed from a distance. Which also meant resisting the temptation from helping out.
Insights
Insights
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Login flow
A major issue that clients opened up to us about was admins having duplicate accounts. This would happen because users would opt to login by Facebook on the first sign in but then forget and sign up with email the next time. This resulted in multiple accounts being given access and opened up the product to misuse.
Reporting explicit songs
Although, Rockbot curates the songs carefully before putting them on the server, users expressed the need to ban certain songs from their playlists. It also helps us as a company understand what music, businesses find inappropriate. So a reporting system was required.
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Ease in access
We saw users getting irritated at certain points while using the app. So we focused our observations to this points of friction and asked some contextual questions. We found that users preferred to have information at hand since they saw it as a utility app. Having to navigate back to home, for example, just to see what music or playlist is playing, was seen as cumbersome.
On-boarding
Some of the clients we spoke to were new users who were using the product for the first time. The hardware, which is a very simple plug and play device, was isolated from the app. Here we saw an opportunity to on-board users with the hardware driving home the message that the product is very simple to use.
Based on our insights from research we defined the scope of the project into 4 major problems.
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4
How might we
Create a login flow that helps users login in to the right account.
How might we
Create a system that helps users report songs for their content to Rockbot.
How might we
Help users access status information at any point of the experience.
How might we
Ease the learning curve for users installing the Rockbot hardware.
1
How might we
Create a login flow that helps users login in to the right account.
To eliminate the problem of duplicate accounts and multiple sign-ins we added an extra step, 'Is this you?'. This identity confirmation step provided the user necessary info, like last activity and profile info to make sure they are using the right login.
2
3
How might we
Create a system that helps users report songs for their content to Rockbot.
How might we
Help users access status information at any point of the experience.
To make it easier for a user to report songs or artists from the curated playlist, I created an action button.
The Left Nav gave the user access to any part of the experience. It also gave critical information to the user, like what playlist and song is playing and for how long it would play. This solved the user's preference to have information at hand.
4
How might we
Ease the learning curve for users installing the Rockbot hardware.
Installing Rockbot is as simple as 1-2-3. The three step process was introduced to the users in the form of 4 on-boarding screens that drove home the message that Rockbot is a user friendly product.
Since the visual design would be tied in with the rebrand, I tried to incorporate elements of what our potential rebrand could look like. We had boiled down the attributes our brand would have, thanks to numerous discovery sessions and conversations with clients and stakeholders. We wanted a young and vibrant brand that spoke the language of music, at the same time was honest and clear in it's voice. I maintained the primary blue color but made it more sharper by combining it with a refreshing green accent.
Conclusion
Although, I had led projects in the past from concept to execution, I had the comfort of working in an agency environment and constant peer feedback. But at Rockbot I worked on the project on my own. Typical of a startup, I was thrown at the deep-end of product design. This project was an incredible learning experience in working on an end-to-end solution, owning every aspect of the design process and viewing up-close how products are developed in engineering. It gave me the confidence to own projects where I would be the sole designer.
This dashboard app, is the interface that most of our clients see and use, and is the face of the company to most of them. This prototype not only gave them our best face, it solved a lot of the problems that our clients had been facing for a while.
Garrett Dodge
Chief Executive Officer
Rockbot Inc
+ BRANDING
+ INTERACTION DESIGN
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© Shantanu Salgaonkar 2019
Rockbot
Background
Research
Problem space
Solutions
Visual Design
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