SoundCloud UX Research
Research86% expected it. 8% could do it.
Five of us spent a quarter picking apart SoundCloud's desktop site for a grad research course. Heuristic audit, competitive analysis, tree testing, moderated sessions, a full A/B test, the works. We weren't just trying to list what felt clunky. We wanted to find exactly where the interface stops matching how people actually think, then prove our fixes actually worked before we ever recommended them.
Quick scan
- SoundCloud's desktop site has usability friction a heuristic audit alone can't prove out or prioritize.
- Five of us ran it as a grad research methods course, no affiliation with SoundCloud - I worked across all 5 research phases.
- Heuristic audit, competitive analysis, a 51-person tree test, a 6-person moderated usability test, then an 85-person A/B test of the live site against our redesigned prototype.
- The headline finding: 86% of people expected to create a playlist from the Playlists page; only 8% actually could.
- The two fixes we validated, playlist creation and volume control, didn't need new features - just moving what already existed to where people were looking. +45% task success, confirmed by the A/B test.
Team
Ariana Davies, Shawn Farnum, Nic Loyola, Carly Pratt, Sage Young
Role
UX Researcher - contributed across all 5 phases
Timeline
12 weeks - Winter Quarter 2026 · UC Irvine, HCI & Design
Status
Completed - Final Report Delivered
Overview
Five of us picked SoundCloud for a research methods course at UC Irvine - no connection to the company. We wanted to go past "this feels clunky" and pin down exactly where the site stops matching how people think, then prove whatever we recommended actually worked.
So we backed opinions with data: a heuristic audit and competitive analysis, then three rounds of research - tree testing, moderated sessions, and a quantitative A/B test.
86%
expected to create a playlist from the Playlists page
8%
actually could - the real path is 3 clicks deep in a song menu
+45%
task success after moving that path to where people looked
How we got there
Heuristic analysis
We went through every core flow, browsing, search, library, playlists, comments, and checked each one against Nielsen's 10 usability heuristics. That gave us 17 findings, tagged Major, Moderate, or Minor depending on how much it actually got in someone's way.
Competitive analysis
Then we looked at how everyone else handles the same problems. Spotify and Apple Music directly, plus Bandcamp, YouTube, and TikTok for how they get people discovering music and actually connecting with artists.
Tree testing
51 people navigated a text-only version of the site, just labels and hierarchy, no visuals at all. That let us isolate whether the structure itself matched what people expected, before design ever entered the picture.
Moderated usability testing
6 people worked through real tasks on the live site, talking through their thinking out loud. This is where you actually learn why something went wrong, not just that it did.
Quantitative A/B test
Finally, 85 people split between the current site and our redesigned prototype, timed and scored on the same four tasks. That's how we'd know for sure whether what we were proposing actually worked.
The clearest signal: playlists
One result from the tree test jumped out at us right away. 86% of people expected they could create a playlist straight from the Playlists page. Only 8% actually managed it, because the real way to do it is buried three clicks deep, inside the ellipsis menu on one specific song.
That's not something a tooltip fixes. People are walking in with a completely reasonable idea of how this should work, and the site just doesn't offer it.
Tree test, Task 1: creating a playlist. 86% expected a path from the Playlists page itself; only 8% found the real one.
What people said while doing it
Six people talked us through the same core tasks live on soundcloud.com. Three things kept coming up, over and over:
- Search was basically how people navigated the whole site, but it matched on literal words in the title, not on what type of thing you were even looking for. Typing "ed sheeran album" pulled up songs with "album" in the title before it ever pulled up an actual album.
- Playlist creation was rough on people, 18 negative reactions against 11 positive ones in this task alone. One person basically gave up mid-task: "There's nowhere obvious here for me to actually add a playlist."
- Comments and following an artist both felt kind of pointless to people. One participant figured artists get too many comments to ever notice one more. A few others just weren't sure what following someone would actually change for them.
There's nowhere obvious here for me to actually add a playlist.
Moderated usability test participant, mid-task
Two very different people, same walls
We built two personas to keep ourselves honest about who we were designing for: Alex, new to the platform and still figuring out their taste, and Joe, a power user with 1,000+ liked songs who wants to DJ but can't find anything in his own library.
They're about as different as two listeners get, and they hit the exact same walls - a sign the problem is built into the product, not "being new to it."
A/B test results (85 participants)
We ran the same four tasks twice: once against the live site, once against our redesigned prototype.
| Task | Success | Time | Ease |
|---|---|---|---|
| Find & listen to an album | — | 74s → 58s | 22% faster |
| Adjust the volume | — | 36s → 19s | 26% fewer misclicks |
| Comment on a track | 49% → 63% confidence | — | No lift in perceived engagement |
| Create a playlist | +45% success | 2.3x faster | 2.2x more direct |
Volume and playlist creation were the clear wins, and both just needed something that already existed to be more visible. Commenting told a different story - the fix worked exactly as intended, people just didn't end up caring that much either way.
Negotiating what actually shipped in the prototype
We didn't have engineering time to redesign every flagged issue, so we had to argue for which ones the prototype and A/B test would actually cover.
Constraint
The heuristic audit flagged comments and following as confusing on top of playlist creation and the player bar - we couldn't prototype and test all of it in one quarter.
Decision
We prioritized playlist creation and the player bar for the A/B test, and treated commenting as a smaller, lower-confidence fix.
Resolution
The data backed the call: playlist creation and volume control drove the biggest, clearest gains. The comment fix worked as designed but didn't move how engaged people felt - confirming it was right to not over-invest there.
Constraint
Tree testing showed people expected to create a playlist from the Playlists page itself, but the simplest fix (a tooltip pointing at the existing menu) wouldn't have changed the actual information architecture.
Decision
We recommended adding a real Create Playlist button directly to the Playlists tab instead of just improving discoverability of the existing path.
Resolution
Validated in the A/B test: task success rose 45% and completion time more than halved, versus a smaller expected lift from a discoverability-only fix.
A single Create button added to the Playlists tab lifted task success 45% and cut completion time to under half.
What we'd fix first
We sorted everything by how much pain it actually removed versus how much work it'd take to ship, so nobody's left guessing where to start:
- Highest priority: add a real Create Playlist button to the Playlists tab - not buried three clicks deep in a song's menu.
- Also urgent: redesign the player bar so it's actually visible - bigger, higher contrast, with the volume slider showing by default instead of hiding behind a hover.
- Next up: rank search results by relevance and content type, not just whatever literally matches the title.
- From the heuristic audit: give songs, albums, and playlists their own distinct icons, and fix the liked-heart so filled versus outline means the same thing everywhere on the site.
- Worth a look eventually: commenting alone doesn't feel like connecting with an artist to most people - social features need to go further than a text box.
- From the competitive analysis: more content variety, live sessions, video, would help SoundCloud compete for a younger audience against TikTok and YouTube.
What this was actually about
The two biggest wins didn't require building anything new - the ability to make a playlist and the volume slider both already existed. We just moved them to where people were actually looking.
A lot of what feels like a "usability problem" is really a gap between what's in someone's head and what's on the screen - and the only way to trust a fix closes that gap is timing a stranger doing the task, not deciding for yourself that it feels better.