Integrating the Awaves Shop for Enhanced Customization

UI-UX designer, graphic designer, and Wordpress-Elementor developer.

Awaves was a music tech startup founded to bring the next generation of music innovation through AI DJs. Among a few of their digital products is the main product called Awaves Play. This web-application offers several users to be grouped and listen a genre of music everyone enjoys for as long as they will. One of their future goals is to introduce an Awaves Shop for users who want more features from their services.

My tasks include introducing new feature such as the Awaves store and ads, making basic UI improvements to the app and website, creating slides and visual assets for presentations.

Awaves sought to expand its music player by integrating a store that offers both paid and earnable advanced features, utilizing their currency, 'drops.' The primary goal was to provide users with music style variations, transition options, customization features, and bundled offers. This store is designed to enhance the experience for dedicated users and those seeking more than just the basic functionality.

Understanding the business goals was crucial in identifying relevant UIs and apps to draw inspiration from. Many pre-existing apps, like Duolingo, Clash Royale, and Clash of Clans, had successfully implemented similar features. These apps allowed users to earn key features without spending money, while also offering the option to pay for faster progression. Striking this balance is tricky—if earning rewards is too easy, users won't spend money; if it's too difficult, users may leave before recognizing the value of the features. Given that Awaves is a startup, we decided to prioritize user acquisition over immediate monetization, opting for a more accessible earning structure. However, I also proposed ways to increase user engagement and growth by introducing tasks like inviting friends or hosting party rooms. This approach ensured that even if users weren’t spending money, they were helping to grow the user base by spreading awareness of Awaves.

Now that the contents and the strategy for the Awaves store was clear, it was time getting into the details, starting the user flow on how the user should navigate between the Awaves play and Awaves store. As the start-up wanted to introduce the shop feature, one of the initial challenges was in the placement of the shop feature button. There were two options as seen in the video on the right. Option A: being part of the menu gave the UI a clean look and reduced any distraction from the graphics at the center. Option B: the advantage of the shop button being outside the menu was the clear distinction between the app functionalities and the shop itself. However, there is small disadvantage for left handed users if the button was placed on the right top corner. Together with the company, we ran some A & B testing on few users to help decide which direction to pick. You can see the answer to that when the new version is released!

Introduced 4 new pages each displaying different features. The first three pages included add-ons for users to purchase with drops. These add-ons would allow more customization of DJ music genre, music mixing capabilities and displayed room. The last page included the a place to buy the drops but also to earn them. This was quite important as it was a new service so people maybe unwilling to purchase early-on.