What Site Can I Find to Upload Smule Songs

Smule - Vocal Upload Tool

The Trouble

But 60% of songs uploaded to the Smule music library, included metadata tags such as genre and language. Incomplete metadata was hampering Smule'south ability to deliver a personalized consumption experience.

My Role

I was responsible for evaluating usability challenges in this tool and updating information technology to enable and encourage metadata input.

Final Event

92% of the songs uploaded at present have at least ane metadata tag 🎉

Final Blueprint Prototype

Here'south what you will find on Smule.com as of writing this case report.

Context

Smule is a karaoke app with over 40 meg users worldwide. The songs on the app are arranged and uploaded by the users themselves, through the song upload tool. More metadata tags associated with uploaded songs means better personalized recommendations to users, hence the interest in improving this tool.

Goals

100% of songs uploaded have at least i language tag.
Input at least one metadata tag to describe a song'due south mood/emotion.
Input at least one relevant genre tag per song.

Usability Testing

I tried the song upload tool, and the beginning time took almost 10 minutes to input tags and all the metadata required to place a song. This excludes the corporeality of time it would take to farther adapt the song, add lyrics, select parts etc. Information technology felt more like piece of work than fun, so I ran usability tests to investigate what other aspects of the tool was causing friction.

My test subjects - all first fourth dimension users of the tool - faced several usability issues. Those relevant to our goals were that:

5 / 5

users preferred to skip not-mandatory input fields.

iv / 5

users didn't know how to go about determining the Genre, Mood/Emotion of a song, and and so left it blank.

3 / v

users didn't realize the input fields would catechumen to tags.

The Opportunity

The solution was not blueprint-only as we had to think about what kind of information would be useful to collect in the form of tags. I reframed the bug into:

Generate a finite list of Genre titles that users can search and select from.
Print upon users through the utilise of meliorate pattern and copy, the importance of inputting tags.
Consolidate screens and modify layout to highlight required fields.

What Didn't Piece of work

1 of the concepts I struggled to design for was how could I aid our users pick relevant tags to draw the mood or emotion that a song is evocative of? I worked with a domain proficient - a music researcher - to understand and explore the different ways in which mood could be construed and categorized. I also consulted the car-learning team to sympathize how they apply metadata to personalize recommendations. From a user's perspective, I had ii master takeaways:

Tags cannot be captured in a single word

I asked testers to recommend "mood" tags for Britney Spears' Baby One More than Time. I got, Political party, High School, 90s, Pop, Teenage, Crush and Girls. Then I exposed them to the song upload tool - generated by the music researcher and motorcar-learning team - a list of adjectives awaited them. The users tested had some stiff feelings most the list:

"...tags seem prescriptive…"

"What's the difference between 'joyous' and 'elated'? How do I know which to cull?"

"What if I wanted to include a mood that was more than 1 word? Similar chill music, or hip-hop. To me, that'southward mood."

"This feels more like a GRE/Sat Vocab list."

That final one ☝️ fabricated it clear to u.s. that machine-learning needed to work with the unstructured input, instead of prescribing to the users how to recall.

Tags need to marshal with more commonplace expressions

The second takeaway was that when information technology comes to music, mood is often mix of an emotion, a moment in time, a place (or all three at one time!) captured as a phrase - due east.g. fri night vibes, disco music, chill beats etc. It became credible to me that tags for mood in detail need to marshal with more commonplace expressions. And so I iterated on that concept:

Tag and layout suggestions for Mood.

Tag and layout suggestions for Occasion.

four/five users tested felt this layout aligned better with how they would categorize a song they uploaded. They besides felt that the presented options reduced cognitive load considering the main task at paw is non well-nigh tag input, but nigh arranging a song for other users to sing to.

The above explorations did not transport as part of this project. Notwithstanding, information technology was crucial in convincing the motorcar-learning squad to modify how they collect and store unstructured data when information technology comes to tags, which was implemented as role of this project.

What Worked

Marker required input fields

In the quondam design, it wasn't clear which fields were required and which weren't, until the user tapped "Adjacent". I consolidated all the data input screens into 1 and made it clear which fields were mandatory.

Providing users with a purpose

The in one-time design, users didn't accept enough context on why they needed to add together metadata. In the redesign, I led with that purpose equally the header (to brand your song easier to find). Metadata is likewise highlighted as a tag at the betoken of input - 5/five users when tested, said this made it clear that these were tags. I also included tooltips to guide the users on how to add together tags.

Pre-defined Dropdown List

Finite dropdown lists were generated for Language and Genre - this led to 92% of real globe users calculation at least one Language and at least 1 Genre tag. This brought the much needed structure to our information where it mattered.

Future-proofing Metadata Input

As a musician myself, I know genres and styles in music are constantly evolving and being reinterpreted. I wanted to time to come-proof this tool for those circumstances, so I designed for the ability to add user-defined fields which would trigger and event in the backend so it can be verified, de-duped and added to the listing.

Final Thoughts

How can I make it 100% fun?

I interviewed ability users of Smule, and many of them care for this tool every bit something very functional - They were so used to it and knew exactly how to piece of work their mode effectually it. Had one of the company's growth objectives been to expand its collection of songs, I would relook this tool in its entirety. Simply for at present, hither'south my upgraded interpretation of a fun, immersive song system experience.

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Source: https://www.sruthykumar.com/work/2019/10/24/smule-song-upload-tool