But, as a designer with a background in Human factors psychology, I believe that it’s too early for calling it a complete failure. The company is a few years old and can redeem itself, by not trying to do what Spotify does best (Give people access to all the music they want all the time — in a completely legal & accessible way). Instead Tidal should focus on improving its mission: Bringing fans and artists closer together and creating a sustainable industry model that values music and artists.

What should TIDAL do?

Tidal is not a disaster, it is a good product that is staggered by its potential because the product itself has fallen into what I call the “Monkey see, monkey do business.” Wherein, a company, build its service by behaving like its competitors without an understanding of why it works or concern for the consequences. This model ultimately kills innovation and a companies’ true potential. However, along with the line of writing this, I ended up digging my teeth into UX research and design to fill in design gaps that can help Tidal unify user-growth and product differentiation. What you’ll find below is a case study offering “potential solutions” to address some of Tidal’s problems, as well as ideas for future development. My process was guided by qualitative user research that I kept from one of my UX class project related to music streaming service.

I approached my redesign in three steps while researching throughout:

1. Refocusing Product Objectives

2. Visual Interface

3. Brand Identity

1. Refocusing Product Objectives

As mentioned earlier Tidal should focus on refining its mission rather than trying to beat Spotify in its own game. It’s typical for competing companies to try to retain their competitive edge by matching and then outdoing each other’s feature or design and sometimes this work, i.e., Snapchat Vs. Instagram. But, getting into a feature parity war with your competitors puts you on a long road to nowhere. Tidal is an underdog in a market dominated by larger companies who share a similar vision, and Tidal needs to break out from that trend by creating an interface and experience that pays attention to music discovery experience centered on artists and albums instead of top 100 playlists that all streaming services offer. As a solution, I came up with this design:

Phone Design still in work!