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How do young people find new music? What do they do with it? And what technology do they choose? Rather than relying on statistics or abstract trend statements, the BBC Future Media and Technology department asked us to provide them with concrete insight into how teenagers use music. Our results are influencing the design of future BBC products and services.
To gather rich and vivid examples of how young people are using music today in order to help the BBC design mobile music applications.
The BBC Future Media & Technology team asked us to conduct user research with young people aged 13-18 to gain insight into their use of media and mobile phones. The BBC wanted a greater understanding of the user base they were designing for and to appreciate:
In order to fully understand the young people we were asked to study, we used ethnographic research to observe and learn about their lives. We recruited four different groups of friends, which we later named The Gamers, The Streetwise Teens, The Social DJs and the Indie Teens. We worked through four activities with them over the course of a few weeks:
The knowledge we gained from these experiences was more relevant to the BBC than the sort of results we could have uncovered by using standard research methods such as surveys and focus groups.
In addition to our in-depth ethnographic research, we conducted workshops with the BBC team at every stage of the project. These meetings allowed our client to keep up to date with our discoveries and have an active part in deciding any new lines of enquiry.
Our ethnographic research provided the BBC with a greater knowledge of how 13- to 18-year-olds live and what they like. The results enabled our client to connect with teenagers as they consume music and gave them practical insights to use as a basis for innovation.
Designing future products and services is challenging and design teams can sometimes become removed from their target audience, so our research proved invaluable to the BBC Future Media & Technology team.
We discovered that sharing music with friends is an important social activity amongst 13- to 18-year-olds. In the 1970s and 80s young people made mix tapes, now they swap MP3s from phone to phone. However, the DRM mechanisms designed to stop digital piracy also prevent people from exchanging music, so many of our participants looked for pirate MP3s on websites such as Limewire.
Our findings also uncovered a common fallacy that young people are universally brilliant with technology. Teens will often go to great lengths to use technology such as Bluetooth and copying an MP3 on to a mobile phone’s memory card. But some activities that older users might take for granted, including how to burn a CD, were new to some of our participants.
The results of our research were detailed in a highly-visual, 80-page book. The BBC Future Media & Technology department were keen for staff throughout the BBC to engage with the study, so we ensured that our conclusions were presented in an interesting and visual way. The report was also publicised in Ariel, the BBC’s internal newspaper.
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