ALPHA Case Study

UX research project for a project management platform for music label marketing teams.

Project Type: Internship Capstone Project for a Global Music Company

Role: Lead UX Researcher

Deliverables: Research Plan, Interview Script, Interview Results, Competitive Analysis, User Flow, Final Presentation

Tools: Lucid, Zoom, Outlook, PowerPoint

  • Background

    ● ALPHA is a product that helps music label marketing teams facilitate collaboration, share assets, and plan and track marketing campaigns.

    ● The ALPHA product team has been improving the tool to meet the needs of its global users, but there are a few areas where additional research was needed to create the best possible solutions for music label marketing teams.

  • Objectives

    ●  Learn how music label marketing teams set up projects.

    ●  Identify pain points in the project creation process.

    ●  Explore opportunities for templatization or project duplication features.

    ● Understand how marketing teams plan their campaigns and communicate their plans with both internal and external teams.

User Interviews

The primary research method for our project involved conducting one-on-one remote user interviews with current ALPHA users who are members of music label marketing teams. The objective of these interviews was to gain insights into how participants utilize ALPHA and other project management tools, as well as to identify any challenges they face when setting up and managing projects.

To recruit users for our interviews, we relied on individuals with whom the ALPHA product team had previously connected with and who were likely to be open to speaking with us.

Participant Demographics

Total Participants: 8

Locations: 6 in Los Angeles & 2 in London

Job Titles: VP of Marketing & Operations, Senior Director of Marketing, Senior Director of Analytics, Senior Director of Operations & Commercial Affairs, Director of Marketing, Director of Commercial Innovation & Artist Strategy, Senior Coordinator of Marketing, Audience Assistant

User Interview Insights

Likes

  • The To-Do feature's clarity and simplicity help users prioritize tasks and meet deadlines effectively.

  • The updates page is effective for centralizing communication and informing all stakeholders in real time.

  • The asset library provides a centralized location for all brand-approved assets, enhancing workflow efficiency and facilitating better collaboration.

Pain Points

  • Most users indicated that the timeline feature is unclear and not intuitive, leading them to prefer other platforms for creating and sharing project timelines.

  • While the asset feature received high praise, some minor bugs are affecting usability. For instance, several users have encountered challenges when attempting to upload multiple large files simultaneously.

  • Many users frequently express a desire for increased automation and template features in ALPHA, as the setup for numerous projects tends to be similar.

User Flow

Based on insights gathered from our user interviews, we developed a straightforward user flow that outlines the key steps users take when setting up and managing projects. The goal of this user flow was to help the ALPHA product team understand how users set up and manage their projects, as well as to highlight some of the main pain points users currently experience with ALPHA that the team should focus on improving.

Competitive Analysis

In addition to our user interviews, we also conducted a competitive analysis of other popular project management tools. This analysis helped us understand the features offered by these tools and identify potential areas for improvement in ALPHA. We organized our competitive analysis around three main features that we aimed to explore further.

Timeline Feature

Templates

Automation

Potential Solutions

In alignment with our research goals, user interview insights, and competitive analysis, we proposed improvements for three key features in ALPHA that we believe the ALPHA Product Team should prioritize.

  • Timeline

    ● Create a list view that includes the date first, task name, status, type of task, responsible department, and the assignee.

    ● Add an option to switch to a calendar view, enabling users to select the month they want to view, and to see project milestones and tasks for each day.

    ● Allow users to easily add a new task to the timeline in both list and calendar views.

    ● Add a button that enables users to export the timeline as a PDF for sharing with external teams.

  • Assets

    ●  Enhance the efficiency of asset uploads, making it quicker and easier for users to upload large volumes of assets to ALPHA.

    ●  Add the ability to save assets as URLs for easy transfer from ALPHA to Shopify.

    ●  Create automated tagging for assets uploaded in the same folder to expedite the tagging process, allowing users to avoid individually tagging each asset they upload into ALPHA.

  • Automation & Templatization

    ●  Integrate ALPHA with popular tools like Monday.com for automatic updates. Information updated on one platform will sync automatically across others.

    ●  Automatically share updates to ensure that important information is communicated throughout the platform.

    ●  Add project duplication and templating to reduce redundant setup work, ensuring a consistent project structure.

Future Steps

To facilitate the transfer of our research findings to the ALPHA Product Team, we created a straightforward diagram outlining the future steps we recommend for implementing and testing the potential solutions we devised. These steps highlight the improvements we believe the team should prioritize to enhance the user experience on the ALPHA platform.

Conclusions

  1. I enjoyed conducting UX research on an existing product with current users. This was my first experience working on a UX research project for a product that was already in use. Because the product was established, we could concentrate on specific features and improvements rather than the entire product. I appreciated the opportunity to delve deeper into particular features and explore ways to enhance them, ultimately improving the overall user experience of the product.

  2. One of the biggest challenges we faced in this project was learning about an entirely new industry and the team’s workflow. It was a significant learning curve to comprehend how the music industry operates, as well as how music is released and marketed. Fortunately, the ALPHA Product Team and the users we interviewed were eager to teach us the basics of music release marketing. This support enabled us to understand how ALPHA functions and how it assists them in planning their campaigns.

  3. I learned that conducting UX research for a B2B product with internal users is quite different from other types of research. This was my first experience with UX research for a B2B product and with internal users. One aspect I really enjoyed was the ease of recruiting participants; the ALPHA Product team already had a clear understanding of who their users were and how to contact them. Working on a B2B product with a specific user base is unique because these users are generally more knowledgeable about the product and their workflows than I am. This familiarity allows for interviews to be conducted with fewer biases and assumptions, which is crucial for a UX researcher.