Project Type

• Startup

• New Product Development

• B2B

Skills used

• UX Research

• Information Architecture

• UX Writing

• Wireframing

• Prototyping

• UI Design

• Roadmapping

Tools used

• Sketch

• InVision

• Typeform

• Clubhouse

Project DURATION

5 Months • November 2018 - March 2019

JAAK Marketplace

JAAK was building rights-management and licensing infrastructure for the music and media industries, utilising blockchain technology to allow collaboration on a global view of ownership and rights.

Due to the problems with rights management and split copyright in the music industry, licensing music is an expensive, laborious and completely offline legal process.

The idea behind the JAAK Marketplace product was a simple one - to create an easy way for app developers to license music.

Development had already started on the Marketplace when I joined JAAK in November 2018. I began by familiarizing myself with all of the existing research and documentation before setting up workshops with key stakeholders to understand and clarify some of the decisions that the team had made. As an ambitious timeline was in place for launch, I expounded the values of Lean and successfully negotiated out some features of the MVP, to be revisited post-launch.

With a growing BD list of startups to work with, I scheduled user interviews with startups building products that used music to understand their pain points with music licensing and to corroborate with the user personas that were created by a former contractor. I also went to represent JAAK at the Abbey Road Red Hackathon to meet with startups building experiences with music.

After clarifying the problems startups and app developers run into when trying to use music in their experiences and coming to a consensus on the features needed for our MVP licensing solution, I broke down the requirements into epics to better systematise our approach.

I ran a session with the broader team to create an assumptive customer journey map. This session was a useful way to visualise the epics that we had left to complete for launch, plan and prioritise their delivery and most crucially, help the team empathise with our customers through their journey with using our product.

We used the evidence from speaking to developers to chart their goals, thoughts, and feelings while illustrating what we believed would be the moments of truth - the touchpoints customers would have with JAAK that had the potential to make or break their customer experience.

The session was highly productive and not only helped to reprioritise the work of the product team, but also the rest of the business.

Beta

With some of the core functionality already built, we decided to open up the Marketplace as a private beta to start getting valuable user feedback as quickly as possible.

In the background, a complex and lengthy negotiation between JAAK's legal and licensing team and all of the major record labels and music publishers was taking place to determine which music would be made available, for which use-cases and at what price. We believed that these negotiated framework licenses would allow us to serve the most use-cases for licensing music.

Since the availability of music in the Marketplace would radically differ depending on the locale an app launched in and how an app used music, we needed to find the optimal opportunity to collect enough information about the user's application to determine whether or not their use-case would be supported.

We needed to come up with a solution that allowed users to interact with the product and understand what content would be available to them before we asked them the strict legal questions that would determine their use case.

The first iteration was simple; we allowed the user to choose their license from a selection of the six framework licenses that were available and the territories they planned to launch their app. We did this to encourage the sandbox-style testing environment that app developers had confirmed they wanted to test integration.

Below you click through a carousel of the first designs for creating an app and selecting a license type.

Part of the negotiations with the major rightsholders included an app approval stage where they would be able to approve an app for the use of their content. I decided that this was the most suitable opportunity to ask for the requisite information needed to license an app. Having already let the developer integrate, test and decide whether they wanted to use the service, at the point of submitting their app for rightsholder approval they were at their most invested stage so that we could introduce the necessary friction.

In order to provide the best user experience possible, I made it clear that we would only ask for this information once, so we could allow developers to continue to add content from rightsholders who had not approved their app and to allow for new rightsholders to join the Marketplace - automating the approvals process in the background.

Working with our in house licensing experts, we created a decision tree that would allow us to categorise an app into one of the pre-determined framework license types we had negotiated with the major labels and publishers. 

Below you can see an iteration of the decision tree, please note I've added a slight blur to this image due to its sensitive nature.

We ran through several variations of this decision tree, testing the questions during user interviews to gauge whether or not app developers were able to answer the questions and then edited the language accordingly.

While creating this crucial part of the flow, we managed to stay lean and not waste precious development time by iterating using a variety of different tools. The use of Typeform was pivotal as it allowed me to quickly recreate the conditional logic, test and refine it with users all without code.

Below you click through a carousel of the final designs for submitting an app for approval.

Managing app content

As many different rightsholders would need to approve an app to make just one song available, we had to make it clear to the user the different approval states of the content they had added to their app so they knew what would be available to their users.

I created a notification system to let the app developer know the status of their app approval and a way to manage the content they had added to their app. Within this, on the release pages, I had to display that certain songs on a release may be pending approval so adopted some of the visual indicators used by Spotify who regularly have to deal with these issues due to different variations of releases being made available, industry takedown requests and copyright chain of title changes.

Below you click through a carousel of the final design for managing app content.

Despite an increasing pipeline of startups and developers testing the product with very encouraging feedback, a variety of factors on the rightsholder side meant a company-wide pivot had to be made with the business scaling down, and the Marketplace project discontinued.

Feedback

“Samir is an incredibly disciplined Product Designer. During the time we worked together, I watched him balance empathy with a methodical approach across both the product design and management process. Samir often went beyond what was expected of him to understand the complexities of our market and wasn't satisfied until his understanding matched mine. Samir can work conceptually, he can work collaboratively, he can work fast, and when necessary, he can grind out a win - he was a pleasure to work with.”

Vaughn McKenzie-Landell - Founder @ JAAK

"Samir is a really broad and modern thinker who is able to see the product development process from multiple viewpoints and really contribute across a whole business. His design work, product management and business sense really helped drive momentum when I worked with him. We worked in different departments but thanks to Samir our departments always felt perfectly in sync."

Hari Ashurst-Venn - Partnerships Lead @ JAAK