Investigate a new way for designers to do solo experiments.

We had experimented with the concept of moods internally for a while. It previously came up in a design scrimmage.

The TLDR of moods is that customers who face choice paralysis would prefer to dive into a pre-picked always on selection of music vs looking for something new.

Why is this a good use of time?

What we know about our listener base from previous studies is that a lot of them are also big listeners of NTS Radio. With a quick competitor analysis with the aid of a tool I adore (SimilerWeb) we can see clear examples of this working in the wild.

This was also recurring feedback from previous studies in the listener team also. The most recent was in a diary study we ran where it came up as a common theme that our users listen when performing a task. IE Cooking, Running etc.

Getting the experts bought into the idea

I reached out to Will to aid with the selection of soundtracks. He’s always got his finger on the pulse of our username so I was lucky to get him onboard to aid with this.I had the plan and build in place.

The next step was for it to be given our brand treatment. I reached out to ou amazing designer Marnie to have her treat the images and bring this work to life. I’m biased but she smashed it.

Crowdsourcing the mood names

Crowdsourcing mood names in Slack. I could get lost trying to conger up the perfect mood name. As time was off the essence I turned to my teammates for naming inspiration. I was not let down...

This also helped get others excited about the experiment to drive momentum.

Building for the future

This was a fun one for me to push the embed section of Webflow to the limit. Using JS functions to store the moods whilst building it in a way that scales for the future.

I connected our moods to a new CMS collection that the marketing team can now own this workflow if needed without needing to touch the code at all.

Reaching out to the community

The prototype was live & ready to go. It was now time to get eyes & more importantly ears on it. Will helped post on our community space.

To date it is the 3rd most engaged with discussion which was a great early signal.

I let it collect feedback over the weekend and began to analyse first thing Monday morning.

We successfully built & shipped our prototype in 3 days to get immediate feedback.

This was a great opportunity during design downtime to push on finding out how far we can push the boat on using Webflow for testing outside of the product when there isn’t a capacity to test in-product due to resource limits.

If you’d like to build something similar to this. Please reach out to me. Would love to share my process.

Bonus win

Aside from getting immediate feedback on a potential solution space, we unlocked a new way of testing that allows a designer to go solo.

🥄

Self serve

We unlocked a new workflow to showcase what can be possible with independent testing.