PremiumBeat, a Shutterstock company, is a curated royalty-free music eCommerce platform providing exclusive, high-quality tracks for use in various media projects, including videos, films, television programming, apps and games. From April to December 2020, I joined the PremiumBeat team as their principal designer. Our primary focus was to enhance the music search experience for our customers on the PremiumBeat platform. We initiated the process by conducting thorough qualitative user research to complement our quantitative data analysis. These insights contributed to the successful implementation of the very first PremiumBeat subscription.
PremiumBeat webpages mockups were initially designed using Adobe Photoshop. To break silos and foster collaboration between the different Shutterstock teams and designers, I took the initiative to reproduce PremiumBeat designs in Sketch alongside a styles and components library that would be accessible and shareable across the company and serve as a reference for the Shutterstock Music product optimization.
Another responsibility I had working on the PremiumBeat platform was to select imagery for the monthly marketing emails and thumbnails for the Collections page on premiumbeat.com, helping ensure brand cohesion.
Our team shortly focused on user research as our insights were outdated. We concentrated our research plan on customers’ workflows to better understand their music search behaviours and their expectations from the PremiumBeat platform. Our Product Manager and I conducted a series of 5 user interviews, which helped us draw insights and design new core personas for the UX and Marketing teams to refer to.
Those new insights allowed us to prioritize new features and optimizations to improve our customers’ search experience, like further filter panel explorations on the PremiumBeat search results page or enhancing the visibility of the “Search similar tracks” feature.
I also helped prototype a few UI improvements of M.A.X, a virtual assistant that the PremiumBeat team developed during a hackathon before I joined their group. At the same time, some efforts were being put into improving our taxonomy.
My most significant contribution during the 9 months I spent helping the PremiumBeat team was the launch of their first subscription, as one critical insight from our user research was the strong appetite of our recurring customers for a subscription model.
At the time, our customers could only purchase PremiumBeat tracks “à la carte” and choose between 2 license options: Standard or Premium. With a PremiumBeat subscription, they would now get access to PremiumBeat’s exclusive music library at a great value. The limited subscription would include 5 Standard Licenses per month, with several conditions we needed to clarify to customers (for example, a small collection of tracks were not included in the subscription for contractual reasons).
I first worked on identifying the appropriate areas where we could surface our new subscription offering in our customer’s journey on the PremiumBeat platform. Then, I designed different variants of an announcement banner across the website: on the homepage first and as an upsell in our cart and checkout flow. Our Pricing and FAQ pages were also updated with the new subscription offering.
In the “Buy License” dropdown appearing for each track on the search results and song details pages, I integrated the new option to license a track using a subscription credit, designing variants for different scenarios:
→ the customer has not subscribed yet;
→ the customer has a subscription and enough credits;
→ the customer has a subscription but no credit left.
I also revised our Cart and Checkout flow, added a new “Subscription” section on the Account and Orders pages, and prepared cancellation flows that would trigger a quick survey allowing us to collect feedback from unsubscribing users and refine our offering.
The PremiumBeat subscription launched smoothly on October 14, 2020, and was successfully welcomed by our customers, with thousands of new subscribers within the first month. As expected, the team monitored cancellations numbers over time and, most importantly, identified the reasons behind cancellations. Interestingly the top 2 reasons for our customers to cancel were “not having an ongoing need at the moment” (1st) and “the price being too high” (2nd).
Throughout my tenure, I also gained valuable insights into the specificities of the music industry. Still, as Shutterstock refined its vision and priorities, new teams emerged, and I was asked to join and help design a new, exciting initiative that would become Shutterstock Catalog.
