Product Type
Chatbot for Slack with Spotify Integration
Role
Design Director
UX, Copy, Visual Design
Timeline
6 Mos
Projects & Activities
Conversational Interface, Bot Identity & Voice, Recommendation Rules and System Design
Illustration, Content Marketing
Promotional video designed for Sync Music Bot
With the massive adoption of streaming services has come an entirely new classification system for music that transcends genre; millions of listeners designing their own playlists to serve functional purposes in their personal and professional lives.
Functional music and sounds to help achieve sharper focus, deeper relaxation, higher levels of athletic performance…and much more.
Rise of the Chatbots
Well before ChatGPT became the toast of the town, the humble chatbot was having a moment of its own. Messaging and conversational interface platforms were gaining steam, and Sync Project saw this as a natural evolution of how we talk about, share, and curate music. And by providing our service directly in Slack, we’d reach and serve people on a familiar platform where they were already gathering en masse.
Sync Music Bot for Slack fuses the collaborative playground of Slack with the massive music catalog and data of Spotify – plus a little Sync Project secret sauce. Add it to your Slack team, and you’ve got a great way to discover and share music that works to help you achieve your goals.
How might we meet people where they work to deliver a functional music experience?
A Daily Dose
Hypothesis
We could augment Spotify’s musical classification systems with our own algorithms to deliver music daily in Slack – as functional Spotify playlists – that would help people do things like:
Get into and maintain a flow state for designing or coding
Engage positively with work at the start of the day
Re-energize after a mid-day slump
Exercise
Requirements
Work within the constraints of the Slack environment
Create an easy onboarding experience for Slack admins and their teams
Create immediate delight with a relatable chatbot character
Deliver on the promise of a novel music experience!
We also developed sharing and ratings features, which made bot engagement stickier and added more unique data to our ever-expanding pool.
A Warm Reception
Sync Music Bot found an audience, serving hundreds of Slack teams globally.
It delivered daily music sets, personalized to users and based on a combination of millions of crowd-sourced health playlists and acoustic analysis. It made a simple and relatable promise, it was easy to onboard, and it was fun to use.
Getting the Word Out
A few Medium articles and illustrations I created to spread the word about Sync Music Bot
Part of The Team
Cute…and Useable
The visual design for Sync Music Bot was fun – I modeled the bot’s look after a mixtape (old school, sure - but pretty lovable for all that). But the real feel of the thing was experienced through dialog and interaction.
The key to making the bot sing was to make it feel natural in Slack – both in user DM’s as well as in team Channels. Most of the workflows were conceived with a lot of hand waving, whiteboard scribbling, and funny voices. Then all the conditions, logic, prompts, and dialog – along with any error conditions we could predict – were captured in a rather imposing spreadsheet. For the benefit of our team and stakeholders, I’d frequently recreate these as mockups.
I was tasked with developing a conversational, rules-based front-end that would be robust enough to generate positive results, but also unobtrusive and fun to engage with. To that end, I developed a user-command/bot-response matrix around our core functional features.
Installation and Onboarding
20+ Actions & Responses
Song & Playlist Fetching
20+ Actions & Responses
New Session by Musical Function
40+ Actions & Responses
Common Keyword Recognition
30+ Matches & Responses
Ratings & Reactions
40+ Actions & Responses
Sharing (Channels and DMs)
35+ Actions & Responses
Various Channel Interactions
20+ Actions & Responses
Feedback
10+ Actions & Responses
My Slack mockup templates made efficient work of prototyping and testing for overall feel.
Ending on a High Note
Sync Project was acquired by Bose Corporation in 2018. We arrived there as a full team, with fresh IP in Sync Music Bot and our Unwind Generative Audio application. Our mission was to improve people’s wellness through better sleep. Read more about my story with Bose here.
As with all my work stories, there’s much more to talk about, so please reach out via the contact form to set up some time.