For my first project in this module I had to create my own music app. I had to design 3 screens that would feature in the music interface, and these are a dashboard/landing page, track page, and playlist page. To start off this project I researched some of the mainstream music apps and see what they had done for these pages.
Spotify is my personal favourite music streaming platform and it is also the one that is the used the most as they have 574 million monthly users. They have a very clean user interface and their app is extremely simple to use. One thing I love about the Spotify app is that they do a great job at recommending songs. Each week they give you a new playlist that is tailored toward your music preferences and the amount of songs that I have found from this is amazing. I don’t think I could use another music app as I tried using Apple music but since I am so familiar with Spotify I missed it too much. The Spotify app is split into 3 pages, Home, Search, and Library, and also a track page that shows what song you are playing. The home page recommends songs and artists, and also shows your recently played songs and playlists so that you can jump back in. They have a play bar at the bottom which remains on the screen in every page. In the search page they provide a search bar and allow you to browse different categories. I personally think that Spotify has the best design in their app. I really like the black and green colour scheme.
The next biggest music streaming app is Apple Music. They have over 88 million people subscribed to their service. They have a similar layout to Spotify as they have a search page, library page, but they have another page called radio, which specifies in finding podcasts and radio stations. This is quite a cool feature but as someone who doesn’t really use these two things I don’t think I could see myself using this that much. They also used to have a browse page but got rid of that as they put the information and joined it with the search page. The search page provides a search bar and allows you to speak into your microphone to search, which is something that Spotify doesn’t have. They also recommend genres to browse, some being ones that you listen to frequently, and also some that they recommend you to try for the first time. Their library page lets you see all your saved and downloaded playlists, artists, songs and albums. I like how they break it up into these categories to make it easier to navigate for the user.
The next biggest streaming app is Soundcloud with over 76 million monthly users. Out of the three that I have looked at Soundcloud definitely has the most unique app. They feature the usual pages such as home, search, and library, but have an additional page called feed. This page is unique as it plays short snippets of songs, and then allows you to keep scrolling, pretty similar to how Instagram or TikTok works. This is something that I haven’t seen until I researched this app and although I think it is a cool idea, I don’t think it would be something that I use. I think that you are supposed to listen to music properly from start to finish and playing a snippet from a song and then being able to scroll won’t be doing them justice as thats not how they were supposed to be listened to. I do like the overall layout of the Soundcloud app and think that it is easy to navigate, but I think it lacks the luxurious feel that Spotify and Apple Music have, and theres no real desire to stay on the app except to put on your music.
In class in our tables we were given a sheet of paper and then were asked to create a spider diagram and then write down what comes to our mind when we think of music. We then had to further add words that we relate to the words we already came up with, and then try to connect them to other words around the spider diagram. This was a great exercise for brainstorming and mind mapping ideas for our music app so that we could try to figure out what direction we wanted to go. One of my favourites was concerts/festivals, as for my app I could have a feature where you can see if the artist you are listening to has any concerts coming up. Another was Genre and how we linked it to emotions, as different genres bring out different emotions, so for my app I could have a feature where there are recommended genres for different emotions, for example, joy, sadness, excitement etc.
I then looked at the 3 pages that our music app had to include. These were: Home page, Playlist page, and a Track page. The next part of my brainstorming included me having another look at my competitors, examining each of these pages on their apps, seeing what elements they included, how each page was unique to each other, and overall how the UI looked and felt while I was using it. I then jotted down what each page included and then I sketched out what each page looks like on average. Although these aren’t the sketches that I will be using for developing the design of my page, they were to make me comfortable about what is included on each page, and what they should roughly look like.
The next part of the design process for my music app was to sketch out some rough wireframes of each page of the app. These were done really quickly and loosely, as I just wanted to get some designs on paper to help me visualise what the app would look like. I tried to make each one as different as possible, but I had an rough idea of what each one would include already. These wireframes really helped me and as I was making them I kept thinking of new ideas. I also annotated them to help show what was what in the wireframe to make it easier to understand.