Amp
User-generated radio shows, powered by Amazon Music
Problem
With most music streaming platforms, music discovery often feels overwhelming and impersonal. Traditional radio falls short in catering to the desire for personalized music recommendations, leading to missed opportunities for users to stumble upon new favorites. Amp was built from the ground up to redefine music discovery.
My Role
- User research
- Wireframes
- Prototypes
- UI design
User Research and Persona Development
Understanding the nuances of our user base was paramount. We conducted extensive user research to create detailed personas, each representing a unique segment of our audience. This research helped us uncover music preferences, browsing behaviors, and content consumption patterns that underpinned our design strategy.
Simplified Onboarding to Increase User Conversion
I designed an onboarding process that emphasizes the importance of personalized recommendations in music exploration. The steps were kept to a minimum to prevent user dropoff. The process was later expanded to include creator recommendations which helped increase user retention.
Audio-First Discovery
As an audio-only app, we wanted to put audio in the forefront of discovery and added audio previews to the home tuner. As users browse live shows one-by-one, they instantly hear the show, providing better context than text information alone.
Main show tuner
Playback with guest speakers
User profile
Fostering Community Engagement to Increase Retention
At launch, the only way to interact was listener-to-creator by calling into a show and speaking. I pushed to add chat to allow for listener-to-listener interactions. This was immediately loved by our users as the barrier to entry for interaction was dramatically lowered. We later improved the chat experience by displaying a preview in playback, and adding avatars, user mentions, and comment likes — each giving users more reasons to return to the app.
Playback with chat preview
Expanded chat view
Mentions menu
Broadening Search & Discovery
We added the ability to listen to past shows which greatly increased a user's chances of finding something relevant to their interests. With discovery no longer limited to live shows, we added personalized carousels on the homepage along with browsing by categories and search.
Personalized carousels on home
Browsing by topic
Search results
U.S. Patent
While working on Amp I had a patent granted for a feature that automatically creates a highlight reel of an audio broadcast based on user interaction.
View Full Patent
“I loved this feature of the app, it made everything so easy to use.”
Results
For the first year after launch we saw dramatic increases across all usage stats.
+23%
Active Users
+53%
User Retention
+27%
New Users