JB Hi-Fi Music

Background

JB Hi-Fi is a well-known Australian brand, famous for its network of stores and expertise in tech and electronics.

In the early 2010s, the company launched the JB Hi-Fi Now platform, designed for use across desktop, mobile, and tablet devices. One key product was JB Hi-Fi Music, which offered users access to a music streaming service.

But even with a strong retail presence, JB Hi-Fi’s music streaming service was not very well-known in Australia, especially compared to competitors like Spotify. As Spotify became the leader in music streaming, local services like JB Hi-Fi Music struggled to stand out in a crowded market of global options.

Starting Point

The existing product lacked some important features and the interface wasn't the easiest to use, making it harder to compete with other well-established streaming services. We began by researching areas for improvement.

Listener Insights
‍We spoke directly with users to understand how they used our music streaming service. Through interviews and guided testing we learned about their ongoing frustrations, what new features they'd like to see, and any ideas they had for improving the overall experience. Their feedback helped guide the changes we wanted to make.

Competitor Analysis
‍We extensively studied top music streaming platforms such as Spotify, Pandora, and Deezer. This helped us identify key product features they offered their listeners that we were missing, and also allowed us to find certain areas that JB Hi-Fi Music could improve on to help us stand out as a unique, homegrown streaming service.

Findings

Our ongoing research highlighted several problems with the current product:

Outdated Interface
‍The app design felt outdated and clunky, it wasn't a simple task for the listener to play music instantly which affected the core user experience, and overall didn't align with the brand’s values.

Limited Features
‍The product lacked key features like high-quality audio and artist radio, many users were willing to pay more for these features on other platforms, so we needed to offer the same services.

No Social Integration
‍The streaming service also didn't include any social interaction, such as the ability to follow friends and share music between each other, which was starting to become more commonplace with products at the time.

Didn’t Feel ‘Australian’
‍We were one of the only locally-created music streaming services yet we didn’t highlight our homegrown identity, users wanted to support a product that focused more on Australian artists and content.

Solution

We completely redesigned the JB Hi-Fi Music app from the ground up to address these issues.

The new interface was much more modern and far easier to navigate, which also aligned with the brand’s identity. By focusing on large images and colour-coded CTAs to play music as soon as the user lands on the artist page, we found this approach to be the most engaging, and offered fans a greater interactive experience when scrolling through their favourite artists.

We also added some essential features such as high-quality audio, artist radio, trending songs, and personalised recommendations to help us better compete with the other music streaming services.

Another feature we introduced was social integration, which we dubbed 'Crowd' allowing users to follow friends, see what they're listening to, share music with each other, and discover new tracks.

Finally, we focused more on showcasing Australian content by collaborating with local artists to create exclusive playlists for JB Hi-Fi Music, giving the platform a more unique, homegrown feel.

The overall user experience changes proved to be highly successful, downloads of the app increased significantly and online reviews were overwhelmingly positive. So much so that the JB Hi-Fi Music app was nominated at the Aria Awards for Outstanding Digital Service, up against the likes of iTunes, Spotify, and YouTube.