Promoting Daily Action on a Mobile App for Musicians
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About
Daylie is a mobile application that promotes consistent daily action to help musicians stay on track with their goals. The founder x no-code developer (Bubble) had previously led a community-building startup for college musicians, through which he noticed that musicians lacked motivation on a consistent basis. Daylie supports the hypothesis that small, daily actions will lead to great progress over time.
The founder was seeking UX design support before officially launching the MVP in February 2024.
Role
Product designer
Timeframe
January 2024
Deliverables
Mobile application (prototype)
It's difficult for musicians to stay motivated.
Many musicians look at the successes of other artists—whether that be Taylor Swift or a viral TikToker—and feel like they aren’t going anywhere. Instead of focusing on what they can do today to grow their work, this perception of overnight success leaves musicians feeling discouraged and unmotivated.
During his many years in the space, the founder observed how difficult it was for musicians to stay motivated on a consistent basis. Based on these user insights, the Daylie app would encourage musicians to take daily action towards their goals.
SCOPE
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Discussions with founder
DEFINE
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User persona
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Problem statement
IDEATE
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Brainstorm solutions
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Impact v. investment prioritization
PROTOTYPE
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Visual hierarchy
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Navigation
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Wireframing
TEST
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User and technical feedback
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Iterations
Understanding the user
Across several discussions, the founder shared with me the user insights he had gathered through several years of launching his previous company. With these findings in mind, I created a user persona to ground the design approach.
Well... how do we promote daily action?
The founder had developed an MVP concept that utilized a daily streak to keep users motivated. Every day, users could create an entry (‘record’) about what they were focused on for that day, which would count towards their streak.
With this foundation, I considered other features that could help users stay on track and analyzed them across expected user impact and technical investment.
Given the MVP stage, features that directly supported daily action were prioritized. These included the daily streak, as well as a visualization of a user’s completed days to encourage their progress. Further, notifications were identified as a low-investment method to prompt users to fill in their entries.
Drawing on user research, the assumptions guiding the deprioritized features were as follows:
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Community interaction is positive, but not the driving motivational force for action (based on the founder’s previous platform).
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Users have personal methods of organizing their tasks and goals; Daylie is for promoting these actions, no matter the task management system.
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Although fun, media entries are unlikely to be the make-or-break for continued user engagement.
Platform Navigation
Based on this feature prioritization, I began wireframing in mid-fidelity. I created a simple navigational scheme with a tab for “community” (viewing community entries) and a tab for “home” (viewing personal progress). Profile settings could be accessed from any page.
Community page.
Home page.
Profile page.
Balancing streak with overall progress
Streaks can be tricky. As much as they can encourage a user to continue an action, they can discourage a user to quit completely if they miss one. In other words, as accomplished as you feel when you log the 40th day of your streak, as disappointed you feel when you miss the 41st day.
Based on the user persona, we wanted to maintain a sense of positivity and perspective, especially in the case of lost streaks.
For this reason, I carefully considered how to visually balance the streak with the day count (the total days that a user has completed entries). I created a scheme wherein individual entries would display the streak and day count with almost equal weight, but a user's home page would emphasize their day count.
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Balancing streak with day count on the entries (left) and home page (right).
The high-fidelity prototype of the Daylie app encourages consistent, daily action.
By balancing the daily streak with the day count and visualization, users stay on track while feeling proud about their overall progress.
Since launching the MVP, we have implemented two additional elements.
Designing a planner
The founder received feedback from users who wanted a planning tool to organize their goals for the future. This challenged our previous assumption that users would prefer to use their own task management systems.
We decided to move forward with a planner feature on the hypothesis that it would increase platform stickiness. Instead of using off-platform methods, Daylie would allow users to create long-term goals, and then provide the daily motivation to get them there.
By prioritizing simplicity, we would be able to assess user's actual appetite for this feature with relatively low technical investment. With this in mind, I designed a simple page with identical containers allowing users to input their goals for the week, month, and year.
Visualizing your journey
The founder observed that many users have loved how Daylie records all of their hard work and often find themselves scrolling through past entries. With this in mind, I sought to create an energizing visualization of a user's progress while working within the technical constraints.
Although I initially imagined illustrative designs—like a 3D visual of a journey with the ability to zoom in and out—I quickly recalibrated my scope to maintain the technical considerations of (1) the given database, and (2) the client's capabilities with Bubble. Ultimately, it was essential to work with the existing entry format (i.e., text-only) and design frameworks (i.e., carousels, lists). This was a very fun challenge!
We designed a visualization for which the only added feature would be the ability to mark an important entry as a “milestone.” The visualization would organize a user’s daily entries by their milestone days, allowing a user to click on a milestone and open a carousel of all of the entries between.
Throughout the design process, it was imperative to maintain a strict prioritization based on expected user impact and technical feasibility. Navigating the technical constraints of Bubble proved a fun challenge, especially for the journey visualization.
Ultimately, simplicity has continued to allow us to probe user behavior, refine our hypotheses, and iterate the platform based on observed needs and wants.
USER RESEARCH HAS MANY FORMS
While the project scope did not include research with actual users, we probed the founder's deep experience with the target population to develop a clear user focus.
NAVIGATING TECH CONSTRAINTS
It was a very fun and rewarding challenge to be resourceful and design within the technical constraints of Bubble, particularly for the journey visualization.
TRACKING HYPOTHESES
Although we initially believed that users would prefer their own task management system, by tracking this hypothesis, we were able to refine our approach and discover user needs.