Digital services (Products) don't obey organisational boundaries

While mobile audio apps are a ubiquitous part of most people’s smartphone entertainment environment, many of the market-leading apps require significant user investment to curate their massive libraries of content.

While near-infinite choice might seem like a selling point, without a user experience that helps highlight content relevant to the customer, it can turn into so much white noise.

Our client SCA, already hugely successful in the mainstream broadcast industry, came to us to help create an app that provided everything their customers needed and, just as importantly, nothing that they didn’t.

We partnered with them to create an app that was based so entirely on, and learned so thoroughly from, user’s needs that it transformed a whole ocean of content into a steady stream of personalised entertainment.

We firmly believe that, when it comes to the journey, if your customer gets lost, then you’ve lost your customer. SCA wanted their customers to be lost in the moment, listening to their favourite song, not lost in a sea of menus, options and irrelevant content.

To provide a firm foundation for our client’s software engineers to work on, we first needed to understand exactly what their customers valued and what they didn’t.

Since we work with our partners, as well as for them, our first step was to conduct nine stakeholder interviews with industry experts. Their expertise and insights allowed us to shape our customer research in the most productive directions.

To create a differentiated and genuinely innovative one-stop audio solution, we needed their customers to tell us exactly how such a solution would fulfil their needs.

We built a comprehensive picture of standard features of more than 50 potential competitors and reviewed up-to-date case studies across similar products and services.

Conducting online surveys with more than 300 respondents allowed us to test the viability and utility of these functions while also generating vital customer-based insights.

To further reinforce these customer verbatims, we interviewed 20 plus customers to drill down to their most honest, and therefore most valuable, feedback.

We often find that, in a world full of challenges, the toughest are the ones you cannot see. To uncover the hidden aspirations and experiences of audio users, we incepted a 7-Day Diary with multiple participants delivering daily insights on their customer journey.

With the raw and real customer data as fuel, we set about building a user-need framework that would be the engine of SCA’s industry-leading audio app.

Our in-depth, customer focussed research revealed that emotion management was the central focus of audio app users and, from these insights, we were able to create four specific need-states: Comfort, Escape, Improve, and Elevate.

With these emotion management need-states defining ‘why’ customers used audio apps, we worked closely with SCA to create a ‘how’ that would build app functionality around those customer needs.

To meet the need-states that our customer research had defined, we created four enablers, Understand, Control, Identity and Community Connection. These enablers would sit outside of the app’s content and drive design and functionality to meet user needs.

All great journeys start with a map.

To build customer empathy into the core of the app’s design, we created a customer journey out of our four need states. This journey highlighted the delights and pain points that customers felt interacting with current audio listening experiences.

Building in that level of understanding allowed the software engineers to step into the shoes of the customer and really empathise with them.

Alongside a customer journey that intrinsically connected the app designers with the needs of their userbase, we mapped SCA’s development journey. Connecting the Jobs to Be Done to each of our four enablers provided a solid foundation for developing the features of the product.