Focus on delighting the user.

Now that Opus stream has successfully launched on the main-net with a respectable collection of musicians signed up, a common suggestion we have been receiving is that the Opus platform needs to be more user friendly — even for the less tech-savvy. The development team agrees. In order to take on giants the likes of Spotify, Soundcloud and Deezer, the Opus onboarding UX must be as easy for the everyday user as possible. Only by doing so, and remaining true to our core goals, can we bring transparency and equity to the music industry.

To this end, our engineering team has been working hard to improve the new listener experience. We believe that signing up to Opus should be as seamless as possible. Through in-depth research on a number of successful streaming across the audio industry we have identified a few key elements of a frictionless signup experience.

First, we should enable the user to quickly sign up and test the waters. We have already done so with our novel trial account feature whereby users can listen to previews of each song for free without paying artists OPT. The next step is to help new users find their music taste quickly. Currently, the new user is presented with empty artist, song, and playlist pages which makes it hard for new users to discover what they may like. To this end, our software team has been developing an intelligent landing system that allows the Opus platform to identify songs and playlists that the new user may like, and through algorithms, populate the new listener account with delights!

The design drafts above show the first iteration of what’s to come. We hope to get this system out quickly for new users to test it out and receive feedback. We hope the community will get involved, and encourage their friends to try this onboarding experience. In the long term we plan to utilize machine learning techniques in order to increase user retention and improve the user experience, for you the listener.

Please do not hesitate to contact us with questions, suggestions or partnership requests — The Opus Team is always here to help! The best way to do that would be either contacting us via sending a message to our fan page on Facebook or an email to support@opus.audio.