Tencent Music Content Creation Hub
A Tool for Creating Playlists to Reduce Costs and Enhance Efficiency (2022)
Background
JOOX as a music streaming product targeting the regions of Hong Kong, Macau, Southeast Asia, and South Africa, often has a need for design collaboration within its internal teams.
When faced with the challenges of saving design resources and being short-handed, this need becomes particularly crucial. That's why our operations and design team took the initiative to create a team playlist template library. We started by curating JOOX's playlists, splash screens, and banners, and developed a comprehensive template library.
The template tools were launched on our internal collaboration platform in 2020. However, we recognize that there are still numerous challenges to address in order to effectively meet the business requirements.
My role
Product Team: 2 Designers (UI/UX), 1 Design Manager
Development Team: 2 Front-end Designers, 1 Back-end Designer
My Responsibilities
Define the visual guideline for content
Taking ownership of defining and organizing early-stage tool issues
Responsible for defining the types of subsequent playlist designs and design direction
Designing various types of playlist templates, including visuals
Collaborating with local designers to use the tools and define standards
Time Frame
A year and half
About ML Playlist template
The full name of the ML template tool is Machine Learning Template Tools. It serves as a resource repository for the JOOX team. In the past, playlist covers were manually created. With the template tool, designers only need to design the templates, which helps generate materials quickly and efficiently, generate code, and handle repetitive design and development tasks.
Short-handed
The development cycle of playlists is lengthy, and there are limitations in terms of manpower and time costs for design teams in different regions.
Effectiveness of
Playlist Content
Users easily perceive playlist cover updates as content updates, and fresh playlist covers increase the motivation for users to click on the playlists.
Consistency in
different regions
The series of playlists lacks content consistency in different regions.
Problem Statement
"How can we help businesses reduce production costs and increase the effectiveness of playlist content?"
Main design solution
This is the platform for content creators for designers who could quickly create and attract thumbnails with several playlist content
Once the content is created, it can be swiftly showcased on the JOOX music resource library platform, boosting the click-through rate of playlists, enriching content creation, and ensuring consistent performance across the platform
Impact
Reduce the process steps
Streamlined template generation: Empowering designers with code generation tools simplifies the process and speeds up template creation.
Seamless team collaboration: Ensuring smooth coordination among product, design, and development teams enhances communication and workflow efficiency for better results.
Template content dimensions
Increase the content dimensions of genres, artists, and scenes in playlist templates to cater to diverse template types.
Regularly update and change template styles to attract user engagement with playlist content.
Increased the Playlist CTR UV
Conduct user research in various regions to understand how users perceive and respond to changes in playlists.
Gather feedback and analyze user behavior to assess the frequency and impact of playlist variations on user engagement and satisfaction
Process
Discover problems of the experience
Deep into the problem of process, consistency, content effectiveness
1.Process:
Complex and Difficult to operate
The current process of using the Template Library is complex and costly, especially for overseas design teams. It poses challenges in terms of proficiency and efficiency, resulting in increased costs.
2. Consistency:
Limited Templates and Lengthy Development Cycles
Lengthy template development process, limited deployment, and low utilization by overseas design team since April 2020.
3.Improving Content Effectiveness:
Addressing Overseas Team Short-Handedness and Demands
In the early stages, we conducted data monitoring for banners using the ML templates and found that they performed significantly better.
User clicks averaged 5,800-7,400 UV per day. Based on this, we inferred that ML templates could also be utilized for playlist covers to drive better.
Define the users
Based on the design requirements, we define our users primarily into two categories: designers and JOOX users.
JOOX users
Internal Designers: Designing various playlist covers and content for operational positions, requiring frequent replacements.
Overseas Design Team: Require timely updates and convenient transmission of design guidelines. In some regions, editing and modifying materials are necessary, but exporting becomes challenging, impacting quality assurance.
Ideation - Survey for insight
During the initial research phase, we conducted ML template library requirements surveys for four different regions' local teams.
Design strategy
Through the survey for regions local team, we come out some design strategy for ML template
Cost-effective editing
No need for labor-intensive manual input.
Boost click-through data
More precise content recommendations to enhance information dissemination efficiency.
Enhanced visual effects
More templates available, tailored to different regions and playlist characteristics.
Improved content freshness
Helps users quickly identify songs while avoiding the monotonous feeling of "Why are these songs again?"
Iteration
Based on our design strategy, we focus on enhancing visual effects and improving content to boost future click rates. We carefully consider design styles and text positioning to achieve this goal.
About Design style:
illustration v.s Actual picture
About multi-language:
We have a lot of playlists in different regions, and we need to consider how the multilingual part will affect the visual
Final Solution
In the end,
We decided to launch Proposal 2's actual picture in the app first due to time constraints and stakeholder considerations.
Measure success
Collaborated with local design teams to provide them with usage guidelines and standardized documentation for the template tool.
Received positive feedback from product and design teams on the playlist content produced using the tool.
Data analysis confirmed an improvement in user engagement metrics, including increased clicks, browsing times, and user engagement with more albums within the playlists generated using the template tool.
Reflection
As an international product with a presence in overseas markets, gaining recognition and acceptance from users in those markets while dealing with cultural impacts and barriers is an ongoing challenge. Here are some reflections on overseas projects:
Establishing Our Own Cognitive Framework:
Develop a deep understanding of the industry, local users, and benchmark competitors from various dimensions. This will allow us to empathize, analyze, and comprehend the origins of aesthetic preferences and user needs.
Explore and Build Our Value System, Knowledge System, and Empathy System:
Construct our own value system and knowledge base, and cultivate empathy. By leveraging a decision-making framework, conduct thorough user research and even drive the involvement of local regions in designing solutions for the template tool.
By continuously reflecting on these points and actively adapting our strategies, we can better align our product with the preferences and needs of overseas users, thus fostering a stronger connection and acceptance in those markets.