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Phase 1
Cross Playlist is an app that seeks to allow the creation of playlists of music from multiple platforms in one centralized place. In doing so, the app aims to solve the problem of users having to switch between applications to play the music they want, offering a simplified and unified interface. During this phase of work, we conducted competitive analysis and heuristic evaluation of multiple potential competitors to identify key components and pain points, and created personas and scenarios to better understand our potential users. Additionally, each team member produced individual design sketches, which were then compared and consolidated into a single unified sketch representing the team's collective vision for the application.
When doing research for Cross Playlist, we performed three research methods, each allowing us to gain better insight into potential issues with similar apps and how we can improve upon them. Our first method was competitive analysis, where we examined three potential competitors — YouTube, Crates.app, and the process of manually downloading music — and evaluated each across five categories: strengths, weaknesses, quality, price, and platform. This allowed us to identify what existing solutions do well and where meaningful gaps exist that Cross Playlist could fill, and served as a strong foundation for refining our own ideas.
Our second method was heuristic evaluation, where we evaluated three subjects in depth: YouTube, the process of manually downloading music, and Soundiiz, a web-based playlist transfer platform. While Soundiiz was not part of our competitive analysis, it was included as an additional heuristic evaluation subject given its relevance to the core problem Cross Playlist aims to solve. Each subject was graded on a scale of 1 to 10 across ten usability heuristics: Visibility of System Status, Match Between the System and the Real World, User Control and Freedom, Consistency and Standards, Error Prevention, Recognition Rather than Recall, Flexibility and Efficiency of Use, Aesthetic and Minimalist Design, Help Users Recognize, Diagnose, and Recover from Errors, and Help and Documentation. Evaluating all three gave us a broad view of the space, spanning a dominant commercial platform, a specialized transfer tool, and a fully manual approach that many users still rely on.
We then created three personas and accompanying scenarios based on the demographics most likely to use our app. Each persona was given a name, background, personality, and goals. Their scenarios detailed specific situations in which they would turn to Cross Playlist, outlining their frustrations with existing solutions and what they hoped to accomplish, helping us ground future design decisions in realistic user needs.
Finally, each team member independently produced an initial design sketch of the application before the group compared and discussed individual approaches and converged on a single unified sketch. This sketch covered key screens and interactions including the home screen, playlist creation, music search, platform connection, and settings, and represented the team's collective vision for the application's structure heading into the next phase.
Competitive analysis revealed that the potential user base for Cross Playlist is very broad, as music listening spans virtually every age group and background. However, despite this diversity, we found that there were not many unique use cases — users primarily want a reliable and convenient way to access and organize music across platforms. Our analysis consistently surfaced a desire for cross-platform compatibility and, where possible, offline listening capability.
Heuristic evaluation across all three subjects gave us a detailed picture of where existing solutions succeed and fall short. YouTube scored consistently well across most categories, earning 8s and 9s in areas like User Control and Freedom, Consistency and Standards, and Recognition Rather than Recall, reflecting the polish and familiarity of a mature platform. Its weaker scores came in Aesthetic and Minimalist Design (7/10) and Error Prevention (7/10), largely due to interface clutter and occasional gaps in confirming destructive actions like removing playlist items. Soundiiz performed strongly in Recognition Rather than Recall (9/10), Aesthetic and Minimalist Design (9/10), and Help and Documentation (9/10), but scored notably lower in User Control and Freedom (6/10), Error Prevention (6/10), and Flexibility and Efficiency of Use (6/10), primarily due to its subscription-based restrictions, song transfer caps, and limited feedback when tracks fail to transfer. Manual music downloading scored well on average across categories like Visibility of System Status (10/10), User Control and Freedom (10/10), and Aesthetic and Minimalist Design (10/10), but ranked the lowest of all three subjects in Error Prevention (4/10) and Flexibility and Efficiency of Use (4/10), owing to the risks posed by third-party downloading sites and the cumbersome process of manually assembling and maintaining playlists. Help and Documentation (5/10) was also a weak point, as no official guidance exists for this method. Across all three evaluations, Error Prevention and user feedback during key actions emerged as the most consistent weaknesses in the existing landscape.
Our three personas reinforced these findings. Despite having different backgrounds and listening habits, each persona shared similar core frustrations: music scattered across multiple platforms, difficulty organizing it in one place, and a strong preference for a low-friction experience. Their scenarios made clear that while users will come to Cross Playlist from different starting points, their expected workflows are nearly identical — find music, organize it, and play it without unnecessary barriers.
The individual sketches produced by each team member similarly reflected these priorities, with designs independently converging on simple, platform-agnostic layouts, which reinforced confidence in the direction of our unified final sketch.
Taken together, our research points to a clear direction for Cross Playlist. Although the potential user base is diverse, the way users will interact with the app is largely consistent, allowing us to focus on a streamlined core experience. The app should prioritize a minimalistic, clutter-free interface that avoids the noise seen in YouTube's music management experience and the friction of manual downloading. Given that Error Prevention was a consistent weakness across all three heuristic evaluations, Cross Playlist should include clear feedback for actions like adding or removing songs, as well as confirmation steps before any destructive actions. The subscription-based limitations observed in Soundiiz also suggest that a more open, accessible feature set would be a meaningful differentiator. Adopting playlist management patterns familiar from established competitors will help users onboard quickly, while cross-platform compatibility and offline support remain the core features that would set Cross Playlist apart from existing options. The convergence of our individual sketches around a consistent layout further validated these conclusions, suggesting that the core design direction is well-founded heading into the next phase.
Our team recognizes several limitations in this phase of work. The competitive landscape for music apps is unusual — it is dominated at one end by massive platforms like YouTube, and populated at the other by niche or largely unused open-source projects, making it difficult to find evenly matched competitors to analyze. Additionally, because Cross Playlist is fundamentally a music listening and organization app, generating meaningfully distinct scenarios for our three personas proved challenging, as users' core needs tend to converge. The inclusion of Soundiiz in our heuristic evaluation, while valuable, also introduced some inconsistency since it was not part of our original competitive analysis. Finally, all members of our team are relatively new to these research methods, and this was our first time applying competitive analysis, heuristic evaluation, design sketching, and persona creation formally, which may have influenced the depth and consistency of our evaluations.