Yonder Music — A Personalized Experience for Every User

Yonder Music is a local music streaming service in South East Asia, that gives subscribers to Yonder’s partnered mobile networks commercial-free access to millions of songs for them to stream, download, and share. They stand out in the digital music landscape, as they offer their streaming service for free, by shifting the cost responsibility from the user to the mobile network providers.

Code and Theory partnered with Yonder to help re-imagine their native applications (iOS and Android). From research, strategy, UX, to visual design, we worked to create a one of-a-kind, contextually relevant, and personalized music experience.

Core components of the new experience include a robust recommendation system, supported by a hyper-specific genre tree and taxonomy, the new Karaoke feature, which allows users to share their recordings and form duets with others, initiating a strong sense of community and constituting an incredible library of UGC content, and the increased ability for locally-popular and independent artists to contribute and collaborate with users to promote the local cultural environment.

Three strategic pillars to address the current issues with the Yonder app and set us up for success with our product KPIs. A simplified experience, backed up by a clear app structure and user-centric navigation to serve both existing and new user bases. We wanted to allow users to explore the app without the burden of registration, for simplified accessibility.

We aimed to provide a First Time User Experience where users are eased into the full experience, prioritizing the features that create the most value first. The priority is to start playing music.

Our goal is to form a one-to-one relationship with every user and retain them through personalized features and content recommendations. The experience is enhanced through in-app messaging and features that adapt and optimize based upon each user’s interests and usage. Our team provided Yonder with the toolkit to plan, manage, publish and optimize content to deliver contextually-relevant experiences.

My role: research, product strategy.

Engagement lead: T. Geudelekian. 2016.

If you’re interested in seeing intermediary deliverables and additional process / approach documentation, feel free to get in touch :)