Shazam
Transforming the universal gateway to music discovery
Story
After reaching out to Shazam directly, a rigorous five-round interview process followed. Soon, I became a Product Designer in a tight-knit, globally recognised team. Together, we had the chance to influence how over 300 million active users engage with music. My efforts were mainly around the core recognition experience on iOS, Android and watchOS.
Learnings
During my time at Shazam, experiences in the following areas collectively shaped my holistic understanding of design processes and definition of responsibility, therefore made me a better designer.
Besides the many lessons I learned here, the team at Shazam made me believe in my own superpowers.
I was fortunate to have been managed by the Global Head of Design at Shazam. As my coach, mentor and friend he taught me how and when to take risks in balancing business and user needs at scale. I'm deeply grateful to the entire team for offering such a formative experience. One that continues to fuel my professional drive even now.
Flexible approach to changing circumstances.
I began this role around the time I moved to London. After a while, my manager transitioned. Subsequently, l shifted to working under the CPO demonstrating my ability to perform seamlessly under changing leadership and diverse environments.
Balancing consistency and platform characteristics.
Ensuring a seamless and consistent experience across iOS and Android required a deep understanding of each platform's unique capabilities while maintaining Shazam's core identity and functionality.
Striving through empowering others.
I had an early chance to step into a leadership role by mentoring interns. Sharing my expertise and guiding them through the nuances of design processes within Shazam taught me a lot about myself. I discovered that supporting others positively impacts my own performance.
How not to fall in love with my designs.
Sometimes, the designs we poured our hearts into might not resonate with users or align with the product's goals as expected. A significant lesson I learned was the importance of detachment from my designs, valuing user feedback over personal attachment, and remaining open to iterative improvements.
Achievements
While many of my designs boosted metrics such as user enagement, retention and conversion, I consider my primary impact to have been raising the company's bar for craftsmanship and attention to detail. The following projects generated substantial value for our users, the company and my professional growth.
The redesigned experience applies a swipeable, gesture-based navigation and puts the content sections much more in focus.
The old version of the song page was a non-ideal compromise between business goals and user experience. All information related to lyrics, videos and the artist were buried below a fold. The most important actions to the business and users weren't emphasized enough.
The redesigned song page created a synergy between business goals and user needs that contributed to a simpler yet more engaging experience. In this version, the preview and song title got much more emphasis, while the artist image gives the page a great visual touch. Sharing and all non-essential actions got decluttered and relocated. The new interactions on this design give users a compact, smooth walkthrough in a much richer content experience.
With this design refresh, we gave more focus to artworks and made the user flow more intuitive while also matching Apple’s strict guidelines.
Smartwatches offer immense delight to users, particularly in the realm of mobile healthcare. They have other practical use cases too. One of them is Shazam. With the refreshed watch app, users could identify songs by a single tap, play them back and browse their history. Additionally, a new lyrics feature has expanded the value for users, while refined transitions and animations contributed to an improved and more intuitive user experience.
As a designer, one of the biggest mental leaps with AR is that you need to start thinking outside the phone.
The structure of the real world, the types of motions the phone might make, surrounding people, various types of objects and even sound played important roles in designing for augmented reality. Shazam's AR experiences were focused on music discovery in a way that songs could be dropped in certain areas for other users to collect. Non-UGC elements such as famous music landmarks were also included in the project.
Pioneered the creation and further development of Shazam's iOS and Android UI kits as well as the foundation of a design system.
The collection and documentation of our symbols and elements helped the entire team and newcomers to navigate our ever-expanding design resources.
Final Thoughts
My life took me on another adventure back in Budapest, so I had to leave Shazam. The experiences gained here were groundbreaking for my career.
