Samsung DJ Phone series
Role : UX Leader for SAMSUNG M7600, BEAT DJ (2009 Feb) and Samsung M6710 Beat DISC
for the European market.
DJ Concept design, Wireframe (DJ UX, Basic interaction, Home screen, Widgets),
Information Architecture, USer Research, Usability Test
Music-dedicated phones were popular for a long time before the Android platform was released in 2009. This started with the assumption that if the function of the iPod was to be absorbed into the phone. The mobile phone companies began to scramble to focus on the music phone. Starting with Sony Ericsson which has a music phone with a music-dedicated key launched on the front, and Samsung also tried to create a TF team with people in charge from different teams for the music phone series and conducted research around three European countries to create Samsung's music phone.
M7600 - Nickname Krump M6710 - Nickname Poppin
Along with the 2.5G music-only phone series, Samsung has released a DJ phone, a 3G touchphone with a differentiated concept. Large-capacity batteries, large-capacity storage space, and high-pixel cameras were of course installed, but it was a new attempt to operate both wheels with a touch input base, and UX also designed the DJing experience in consideration of the physical design of both wheels. The DJing function can be easily accessed through a music player or a dedicated button, and users who do not want to use the DJ function can use general music UX. The M7600 physically borrowed the Wheel design on both sides, so the landscape mode was used as the DJ mode by default, but in the case of the M6710, only one side was used as the Wheel design, so the DJ UX application was used as the portrait mode Default.
About Samsung Music Phone Research before going deep dive into DJ Phone
2008 and 2010 were truly the heyday of music phones. Sony Ericsson released music-only phones with slightly different designs from day to day, and it was hard to find anyone who did not have an iPod among young people. In line with this, Samsung also realized an opportunity in the music phone market, and it came to prepare for the music phone series in earnest. To create a phone dedicated to Samsung Music, a product planning team, a business team, a UX design team, and a product design team conducted focus group interviews in three countries in Europe (UK, France, Germany). I participated in this big research project as a representative of a UX team of 200 people and gained great insight into what each generation wants about music on their phones and what features they don't want to have on their phones. The reason for conducting research in three European countries is that Europe had a 60% share of Samsung phone exports at the time, and UX targeting the European market was applied equally to the Americas and Asian markets.
Many Samsung UI Guidelines, including research materials, are confidential and many contents are still being applied, so I can't post them here, but research-related contents are reflected in both the Music UI Guideline and DJ phone series I posted.
Focus group Interview in Europe (UK, France, Germany)
The three keywords we wanted to know through this research are as follows :
1) Music Dedicated Key: Do users need a music dedicated Key on their phone? Why do they buy a Music phone?
2) Concept of NowPlaying: NowPlaying is different for each manufacturer, How will users understand Now playing? Is now playing a list? or It is just a way to go back to the player?
3) Structure of playlist: Focus group interviews were conducted on various user usage behaviors such as the basic composition of the playlist, how the user organizes the playlist, and how to add music, and then in-depth interviews were conducted with some of the participants.
Finding
At that time, we organized focus groups by targeting users in their 20s and 30s users who use music phones, and those who do not.
1) Group with Music phone in their 20s: Music dedicated key is convenient. However, even without it, you can set Shortcut to enter. The reason for buying a Music phone is that it is annoying to carry both a Music player such as an iPod and a phone. There was also an opinion that updating the music source through iPod's iTunes was inconvenient.
20s, a group with regular phones: Most say they carry a separate music player like an iPod and don't use the Music Player feature on their phones.
2) In the case of Now playing, do you understand it as a shortcut that you choose when you want to go back to the Music player?
In both groups, most users responded that they didn't care.
3) Music Library structure: Some users said that Most Played and Recent did not need to coexist, but most users said they needed two playlists, and there were many needs to make their playlists simpler.
One of the Samsung Music phone series, DJ series
As a result of reflecting these findings, Samsung also released a series of music phones with exclusive music-dedicated keys. In particular, the DJ phone series has been released as part of image-making to strengthen the market share of the music phone market.
Physical Key definition
Krump and Popin have a unique form factor and are unique cases designed with the DJ concept proposed by UX before the product design was planned for the DJ concept. Accordingly, standard Samsung UX such as all apps and navigation systems are applied, but only the DJ concept was applied as a separate project. The music-dedicated key is applied separately to the side.
To make it easier to enter DJ mode while music playing, it was initially designed to allow users to enter DJ mode when the screen is landscape, but as a result of gathering the opinions of various departments, they might often enter even when they do not want to enter DJ mode, and it is expected that it will cause inconvenience to users, so the DJ button was placed separately at the top of the Music player screen.
Basic Interaction with DJ mode
The wheel below is a touchable area and is used for navigation by the user. This wheel area is touchable and clickable at the same time. If there is a focus on the screen, the user can put inputs such as left and right, top and bottom, and OK through the wheel area. However, scrolling by sweeping on the wheel is possible only with touch input.
When the user selects an album from the album list, an animation as if the CD was mounted on the wheel was applied.
DJ Mode
Record: All the changes of DJing that affect the music being played can be recorded
Samples: Press the simple sound list/button to enter the sample.
Filters: The function to affect the entire music being played
Scratch: As the core of the DJ concept, the sound is scratched as the user adjusts/scratches the screen of album art.
DJ phones were not very successful in the market. Even in my personal opinion, I thought this project was for image-making to show how serious Samsung is in the music phone market. However, this project was a meaningful project that started with a UX idea, which tried to apply the DJ concept using Wheel's physical, touch, and sweep interaction.
