UX Design and Web Analysis for Consumer-Facing Digital Experience

Rakuten Music | Late 2022 - Mid 2023

Quick Summary

Usability Test for Website Improvement

Rakuten Music Top Page (Web): Songs Chart Section

Main Responsibilities:

  • UX research, UX design

  • Visual design (in collaboration with UI designer)

  • Reporting and presenting to stakeholders (business team)

Key Improvements:

  • Time-based rankings are all now shown in pills (previously it was shown as drop-down menu, which was an issue).

  • Songs ranking is now sorted from top to down instead of left to right.

  • No more “share button”, in order to reduce unnecessary task / to remove the distraction to the users.

Before Improvement

After Improvement (Released) LINK

Read below for more

・DETAILS・

WHAT & WHY

One day, a representative from Business Team came to me and said, “I think we need to make an improvement for this web-based service. Do you have any idea?”

I tried to do a quick examination about the first glance of the top page of this music service. I positioned myself as a user.

Then, I came up with a hypothesis: Let’s improve the most-above section (the “latest ranking” section) since this is the first thing that users see when they visited this page. Users will decide whether to subscribe or not based on their experience (UX) on this page, and one of them is their experience with “latest ranking” section.

These are 3 scopes of user test:

  • Do users understand better if it’s displayed horizontally or vertically?

  • Do users understand that the songs ranking can be filtered into real time, weekly, and monthly chart?

  • Do users realize that there is a “see more” link where they can see the full list of songs ranking?

WHERE

HOW & WHO

RESULT

RESULT

The result of user testing shows that we need to improve the UI of “drop-down menu” . This needs to be improved in order to:

  • Avoid user’s misunderstanding of the product capability (eg. “we actually have functions of A,B,C, but users are aware of A function only”) which can be resulted in the KPI loss.

  • Improve user experience. By giving the users the ability to explore songs in different timelines, users will enjoy the product and it will affect their decision to subscribe/not subscribe.

I reported the result to the Business Team, and they decided to take this result as a new improvement project.