Predisposition
Pandora has a wide range of functionality and here are a few predispositions that users have that I agree with. Users just start up some music and then go on to do something else, not Pandora Related. Users rarely use any social or sharing fuctions of Pandora. Users enjoy finding new bands/music they like.
Research
Through direct observation a lot of information was gathered on how users interact with Pandora. When new users have a lot of different tastes and like a lot of different bands it can be an arduous task to create enough radio stations tha reflects that type of individual without investing a lot of time and effort. During some of the observations a user would generate only a station or two and then “sit back, relax and enjoy the music” for the entire session and then just sit there kinda bored especially if the user didn’t agree with the music suggested by Pandora.
Insight
The user experience of Pandora is fairly lacking. Pandora needs to engage its users more aggressively and allow for more/better social construction of the Pandora environment.
Concept
I think it would be really neat to expand upon profiles and sharing by allowing users to create their own communities with people they are friends with. A community would make it easy to create radio stations and save personal time. When I started creating my own stations I forgot to put in a lot of bands that I liked and when multiple people are contributing that is far less likely to occur. I know Pandora suggests new music, but that is all by chance becuase the songs are shuffled. If other people are to manually incorporate other bands you haven’t heard of before then you are far far far more likely to hear music from new bands suggested by people the likely know you on a personal level as opposed to music genome song analyzers. I also think when a community is created with personal friends users would more likely create blogs within their communities and share notes about music they encountered.
