The Problem
Audiomack serves 50M+ monthly active users, primarily across Africa and the diaspora, but Day 7 retention sits at only 10 to 15% among Android active users. A full audit across the three critical user types (new listeners, existing listeners, and artists) surfaced friction at nearly every stage: onboarding requests demographic data before a single song plays, the discovery feed favors already-established artists over emerging ones, the creator upload flow has no draft saves or progress indicators, and third-party ads interrupt the discovery experience at the exact moment users are most engaged.
What We Did
We ran a full Nielsen Heuristic evaluation, scoring the app against all 10 usability heuristics across onboarding, discovery, the artist upload flow, and the engagement loop, then mapped every friction point back to a specific user journey. To separate genuine product gaps from features that would just be catching up, we benchmarked Audiomack against Spotify, SoundCloud, and Boomplay across 11 core features, from offline downloads to in-app social messaging. Two Spotify features stood out as pure engagement plays with no premium requirement and no Audiomack equivalent: in-app messaging with social sync, and personal listening streak stats, both used as direct inspiration for the retention recommendations that followed.
The Solution
20 prioritised recommendations across four growth pillars: acquisition, engagement, retention, and creator growth. Highlights include a guest listening mode that removes signup friction entirely, a listening streak and milestone system to build a daily habit, an artist-specific onboarding path with a guided upload walkthrough, and Audiomack AI Companion, a mood-based conversational assistant that recommends music by emotional context rather than genre browsing, while staying fluent in Afrobeats, Amapiano, and other diaspora subgenres that mainstream AI tools tend to misclassify.
Outcome
7 of the 10 usability heuristics scored as needing work or critical, spanning onboarding, discovery, the creator journey, and engagement loops. 20 recommendations delivered across four growth pillars, each mapped to the specific heuristic violation it resolves. One new feature concept, Audiomack AI Companion, designed end to end from the interaction model to a built-in monetization bridge, giving the product team a culturally grounded answer to Spotify-style AI personalization.
