Wondering what’s playing around you? Our new Radar will tell you.
At Anghami, our mission is to ensure our users are satisfied with their experience, and that their journey in the app is seamless. In order to achieve that, we try to utilize our product as much as we can, relying mainly on our data and our users’ feedback.
Music is discovery. According to our data, 76% of our users are categorized as explorers, which actually means that 76% of our users are interested in discovering new music and enriching their music library with diverse content. Over the years, we’ve added multiple features that help such users discover more music that matches their taste. We’ve rebuilt our recommendation algorithms, enhanced our search experience, and added a mixtape generator that recommends songs based on artists you follow.
Need + Behavior = Feature
To meet the need of our users, we need to understand their behavior.
Users often reach out to us with ideas and suggestions of what they wish we would develop or integrate into the app to make their experience even better. It’s always exciting when our study’s result meet the users’ requirements.
And in this case, it made a lot of sense — let’s break it down:
Why
Consolidate users’ need by offering a way to identify music playing around them from within Anghami. As a music app, we offer a variety of music in all languages. So what happens when you hear a song playing around you and you want to know what it is, listen to it, and add it to your music library? Is it really necessary you do a minimum of 5 steps and shuffle different applications to achieve your goal?
What
Integrate our own music identification service, powered by ACRCloud.
From a user’s perspective, it’s quite straightforward really, with one tap Anghami will record what’s playing around you, and will display the recognized song (image, song name, artist name) with quick access to play the song, like it, or add it to your playlists.
Now technically speaking, it’s not a lot more complex: once the app records the song playing, we send it to ACRCloud automatically for processing. If the song is available on Anghami, the app will display the song in question with its details and prompt the user to play it, like it or add it to his library. If the song is not available on Anghami, we’d still show the song’s name if provided by ACR, and notify our content acquisition team so we acquire the rights for it.
How
The decision was made to add the feature to our search tab. Why search? More than half of our users go to search tab daily, which makes it our second most navigated-to tab in the app. We already have a voice recognition feature next to the search text field, where you can use your voice to search for any song, artist, lyrics… on Anghami.
So it only made sense to add audio recognition there as well.
But it had to stand out!
Identity
After going through few options, Radar was born.
And the mic icon was revamped into an animated icon with a yellow-orange background, that you can’t miss ?.
Tapping on that button will open a view divided into 2 sections:
1. Radar
2. Voice Search
Performance
Radar was fully launched during the third week of November. It immediately started receiving love from users on social media.
Meanwhile, we started measuring its performance and studying users’ behavior. We noticed that users are more likely to play the matched song immediately than to do anything else.
Bonus Features
When you work on a feature that you’re excited about, and you start using it yourself, you start pushing for extra enhancements that would make it much more convenient for you as a user, and ultimately for all users.
While testing Radar, we found out that having a playlist that keeps track of all songs caught by the radar very convenient. So before rolling out the feature, we added “Your Radar songs”, which is a playlist under your Music / Playlists that acts as a history of the songs you tried to recognize.
Radar is a feature that users would want to access as quickly and easily as possible. On Android, Radar is a shortcut (long press the app and it’s there) and on android 7 and above, you can drag the option and drop it on the home screen as “widget”.
On iOS, Radar is added to force touch options and will be available as a Shortcut on iOS 12+ soon.
Iteration is key
Next steps?
Anghami’s Radar feature is a feature that people would use on a daily basis. That entails that we keep working on improving it. We want users to be able to access Radar from all devices, so we’ll be considering adding it to our Web and desktop app, and to our Apple watch and Android wear apps. We’re also working on having Radar listen to songs while offline and try matching them whenever the user goes back online.
Our voice search is also going to see a lot of improvements. Stay tuned.
Find this interesting? You can become part of the team, check out our careers page. You can also read more stories from our team by following @AnghamiTech on twitter.
