Women’s Voices — A Product Design Story
This post is part of a series about the women behind ‘Women’s Voices’, an in-app story created by Deezer for International Women’s Day:
Part. 1: Women’s Voices — A Product Story
Part. 2: Women’s Voices — A Brand Story
Part. 3: Women’s Voices — A Data Story
Part. 4: Women’s Voices — A Product Design Story
Part. 5: Women’s Voices — A Product Marketing Story
My name is Jaqueline and I’m a Product Designer at Deezer. My mission is to understand our users’ needs, create visual compositions, and build relevant experiences that people will interact with, easily and fluidly.
I joined the ‘Women’s Voices’ project in the early stages. We wanted to create a meaningful and impactful experience to celebrate and advocate International Women’s Day. In order to develop the whole concept and define the story we wanted to tell our users, we worked in collaboration with multiple teams, using design thinking tools, brainstorming workshops, user journeys — to illustrate how people would interact with the in-app experience — and empathy maps — to guide us on the feelings we wanted to evoke with this initiative (i.e. What would people think of the International Women’s Day campaign? What content would they see, hear and share?)
After lots of online sticky notes and ideation sessions that resulted in about 45 card ideas, our concept was eventually defined. That’s when the real fun started for me: designing the in-app experience people would have in what we call ‘stories’, i.e. thinking up the whole user journey through the content presented, as well as the visual aspect of each screen, and sharing assets for social media.
In collaboration with the Product Design team, I decided on the visual direction for our 12 global content cards and 4 local artist cards, as well as artists’ pictures, and the overall look and feel. Purple is one of the colors used in the International Women’s Day movement, so we decided to use it as our ‘highlight’ (or as designers would call it, ‘accent’) color. Besides, purple is often associated with justice, power, pride and dignity. So it definitely represents the core of the whole project!
Deezer is present in many countries, so designing a single experience that works for different cultures, diverse backgrounds, and numerous languages is always a challenging and exciting experience.
One of the main challenges in designing for ‘Women’s Voices’ was to bring all the interesting and important facts we wanted to share, keeping the story experience format. It should be informative, but in a simple, short, easy way — in Portuguese, French, Russian, or any other language — and believe me, we work with dozens of translations!
What I love about this powerful project is the subject itself. Talking about women’s voices, shedding light on their achievements, recognizing their efforts and challenges (I’m having goosebumps just by thinking about it) is an important way of empowerment and celebration. I particularly enjoyed the data we collected for this experience. For example, I learnt that it would take 11 years if I listened to ‘Respect’, from Queen Aretha Franklin, as many times as it was played on Deezer in 2020. That’s a lot of ‘play’ buttons pressed on that anthem! In addition to all of this, the initiative allowed me to work closely with women from different teams at Deezer. I’m really proud to have been involved in this experience and surrounded by so many talented women.
When it comes to women’s voices, I think about the voice of my sister, my mom, my friend, my colleague. All the women who inspire me, make me learn and grow everyday. And also the voices of those who can’t break the silence yet.
I hope ‘Women’s Voices’ by Deezer can spread the word about the impact women have made in music, despite all the challenges they face every day to conquer their places. I hope we can raise their voices, bring awareness to the lack of representation we still observe in certain genres, but also give hope for change. I hope people can get inspired by this project, learn with it, and be part of change — streaming, buying, reading, supporting women creators.
This post is the penultimate part of a series of articles written by some of the women behind the ‘Women’s Voices’ project. Read the last story now or check the links to the previous articles at the beginning of this post.
If you would like to help us design the best experience to millions of users on Deezer, take a look at our open positions and join one of our teams!
