R/GA

(Jun 2015 - Sep 2015)

In the summer of 2015, I worked at R/GA - an international advertising agency. I was hired as an experience design intern at the Portland office where the primary client was Nike. Over 3 months, I worked with two other interns (an engineer and a visual designer) to work on an App for R/GA, called Coro.

 

Coro App design project

 

Coro is a collaborative music application that allows multiple users to listen to communal playlists.

Problem Statement

 
 

Different people have different music tastes, but in shared spaces everyone is forced to listen to one person's music.

How can we help you seamlessly enjoy your music in shared spaces?

Team

My Role

I worked as an Experience Designer on the team - doing user research, sketching, wireframing and creating a high fidelity prototype.

Investigation

Competitive Analysis

We looked at a bunch of different apps that were trying to solve this problem — DJ-51, Rockbot, Soundtracker, Sonos. All of these apps had a barrier to entry. Users had to open the app and enter a “virtual room” each time they wanted to create a shared playlist.

 
 

Survey

Since we were first looking at building this for R/GA, we sent out a survey to the office to get a sense of how they were currently organizing their music. The survey had 12 questions and we got 67 responses. Here are some key questions we asked:

 

What music services do you use for listening to music?

How do you organize your playlists?

 

I took those responses and grouped them to see what themes emerged. 

 
 

Dry Run

After understanding how everyone was listening and storing their music, we decided to concept test our idea. For this we asked everyone at work to send few of their favorite songs. The next day, we jumbled all those songs up and played it in the office. Through the day, people started taking their headphones off and enjoyed the shared playlist!

After the dry run, we did a post-survey to see if our experiment was a success. We got some great feedback and overall people enjoyed the diversity.

 
 

Ideation

From here, we started sketching out what the solution could look like for creating this collaborative playlist.

 Sketching

 
 

Prototyping for Mobile

Paper Prototyping

 
 

User Feedback

 
 

Wireframing - Sketch

 
 

Playlist picker screen iterations

 
 

Visual Design (done by Alison Martin)

 
 

Interaction Design - Framer Studio (done by me)

 
 

MVP by the developer

 
 

Final User Journey

 
 

Prototyping for Apple Watch

Wireframing

 
 

Visual Design (done by Alison Martin)

 
 

Interaction Design (done by me)

 
 

Final Presentation

Our team presented the idea to the whole of R/GA PDX and to part of R/GA New York. Everyone was really impressed and it was decided to take the project forward and put a team together to build the product. 

"Very well planned out presentation. The demo worked well, you were all super prepared and I think the idea came across very clearly." - Sammi Needham, Group Executive Creative Director

"Really, really great job today! The story you told was amazing and you all seemed confident beyond you years." - Diana Frurip, Design Director

"Well done. Really amazing work. Really well delivered presentation. You should be proud." - Chris Hayes, Creative Director

Comments from my mentor:

"This past summer I had the great pleasure of mentoring Karan as an intern at R/GA. Like a seasoned pro, he was able to jump into ongoing client projects where needed. Pairing with an equally talented software engineer and visual designer, Karan maintained the UX component of an independent project called Coro, a shared-space music app. He lead research efforts, usability tests and exemplary prototypes to create widespread company interest and delight in their proof of concept. The project did not end with the close of the internship—it continues to be pitched within the organization and has great startup potential. 

Karan brings great energy, intelligence, and empathy to our group—his last semester is only going to make him stronger and he’ll be a force entering the workplace at the end of his term. I hope we have a chance to fight for him when he’s a free agent!" - Colleen Miller, Sr. Experience Designer