DISCOVER A WORLD OF NEW MUSIC

    Designed and built for Philips sound, the 'You Need To Hear This' app is about music discovery, but in a whole new interface - crowd music recommendation through the act of listening.

    Discovering music that people are listening to right now in any geographic location. I've heard East London is cool, what are 'they' listening to? How about on Bedford Avenue? Across Tokyo?

    This is an UI refresh of the original app built on the same aggregation and insight framework explained across that initial version and the Philips Tables. And a web front-end offering a sample experience.

    Colour coded progress

    Simple colour coding steps from purple through to red, demonstrate how close to the end of the playlist you are approaching. Getting increasingly more 'red' towards the end.

    Thumb friendly areas were strongly considered for interactions throughout the app.

    Core interactions such as seeking, and accessing contextual navigation - break from conventions, of toolbars and sliders at the base of the screen.

    The user gains a large natural circle motion in the centre of the screen to perform seeking, and allowing the user to press and hold anywhere they feel comfortable, to display a full contextual navigation for the screen they are on.

    Always available navigation is made available through pressing and holding anywhere in the app, displays a contextually relevant navigation, positioned around your thumb for easy access.

    Core operations for the screen you are viewing are displayed. Including updating the map center to your location, and play/pause buttons. On internal pages, where gesture areas aren't visible for skipping tracks, the likes of skip forward/back buttons are added to ensure they are always accessible without changing screens.

    A large circular seek 'bar' gives a more natural gesture allowing the user to grab the 'thumb' in an easy to reach area, and move in a comfortable motion.

    Save a place

    Any place that you discover can be saved for future listening. Same location, same radius.

    Save the moment

    Capture what was being listened to at that exact moment in time. Remember the sound of an event, a special occasion, or just some great listening.

    Remember them

    Easily browse through locations, and play them back in a familiar interface.

    My role

    Having concepted the application and built the aggregation and insights backend, explained and used in the original app and the Philips Tables this project was primarily a UX and UI update, and rolling this out into a complimentary web interface.

    My role covered evaluating user-flows and interactions in the existing application both internally and through gathering user feedback, and devising key areas that could be greatly improved upon.

    I then worked with Marc Kremers on creating updated designs from this. Designing both in photoshop and in code prototypes, to get a truer feel for how the app 'felt' and moved between states.

    This was then followed by building out the complete UI of the app, and front-end development of the web version (integrating into the same webservice).

    Beyond the UI updates, this version was also uncoupled from Spotify, and uses the Soundcloud SDK for all audio playback.