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Wavetune | Mobile App Design

Wavetune
Mobile App Design

SnackEx Mobile App Design

Overview

Wavetune is an application designed to bring people together through the power of music, allowing everyone, with or without a paid streaming platform, to come together and share their favorite tunes.

Problem

While the rise of music subscription services have provided the world with a very customizable listing experience, they seem to have left behind many of the social aspects of listening to music. Many of us have struggled to share music at parties or gatherings with only one phone being able to connect to a speaker.

Solution

Wavetune allows users to create listening parties that permit a group of users to contribute to a shared queue of music. These parties can be in person or online, facilitating the sharing of music in any setting.

Context

This project was created for an Adobe Design Jam. I was paired with a partner and we were given one week to create UI designs that solve the aforementioned problem.

Overview

Wavetune is an application designed to bring people together through the power of music, allowing everyone, with or without a paid streaming platform, to come together and share their favorite tunes.

Problem

While the rise of music subscription services have provided the world with a very customizable listing experience, they seem to have left behind many of the social aspects of listening to music. Many of us have struggled to share music at parties or gatherings with only one phone being able to connect to a speaker.

Solution

Wavetune allows users to create listening parties that permit a group of users to contribute to a shared queue of music. These parties can be in person or online, facilitating the sharing of music in any setting.

Context

This project was created for an Adobe Design Jam. I was paired with a partner and we were given one week to create UI designs that solve the aforementioned problem.

Overview

Wavetune is an application designed to bring people together through the power of music, allowing everyone, with or without a paid streaming platform, to come together and share their favorite tunes.

Problem

While the rise of music subscription services have provided the world with a very customizable listing experience, they seem to have left behind many of the social aspects of listening to music. Many of us have struggled to share music at parties or gatherings with only one phone being able to connect to a speaker.

Solution

Wavetune allows users to create listening parties that permit a group of users to contribute to a shared queue of music. These parties can be in person or online, facilitating the sharing of music in any setting.

Context

This project was created for an Adobe Design Jam. I was paired with a partner and we were given one week to create UI designs that solve the aforementioned problem.

Empathizing

While I’m not a big partier, you can’t attend college without some party experience and every party had a similar dilemma, the music queue.

The music is loud, bass thumping, but everyone wants to hear their own songs. Unfortunately, the burden of DJing always falls on one person, normally the host.

As they go around, keeping everything in order, they also have to take constant requests from guests to play their music. It’s always the same, one person connected to a speaker filtering through random verbal requests.

While this is stressful for the DJ, it’s no better for the guests. Either you give up on the idea of your song being played, or you add to the demands by yelling a song over the existing music. Additionally, many people don’t use the leading streaming platform, or one at all, and aren’t even sure if the DJ could find the song.

Persona

Ideation

After empathizing with our user base, we moved on to defining problems and ideating solutions. My partner and I began by writing problems and generating solutions freely on sticky notes.

After we had written as many ideas as we could think of, we started to narrow them down.

Our features were aimed at solving our users' problems. Such as, a music queue that everyone can contribute to, eliminating the amount of shouted song requests and overwhelmed hosts at parties.
We also ideated multiple other features to facilitate inclusive music sharing, both digitally and in person.

Competitive Analysis

Summary

Upon researching some of the most popular music streaming apps, Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube Music, some design consistencies became clear.

  • Similar homepage format & navigation bar

  • Dark color schemes

Take Away

While our app differs somewhat in functionality from most music apps, due to the consistency of design across similar services, we decided not to stray far from the format and color scheme that users are accustomed to.

Final Designs

Onboarding

​​​​​​​The onboarding process is fairly straight forward for Wavetune. We decided to keep the screens very simple and straight forward, lowering the barrier of entry to the application. We ask our users to connect their existing music apps to make the experience as tailored and simple as possible

Main Pages

Our home page allows users join active listening parties, view recent music mixes from parties that they’ve attended, and see which of their friends are online.  The map view shows users public, in-person, parties in their area to join. The profile tab displays the user's picture, bio and preferences. The library page, as one might expect, displays a users imported music libraries.

Party Feature

The party feature is the primary novel function of Wavetune. Pressing the purple plus icon in the center of the navigation bar will start a new listening party, prompting the user to make a few settings choices to begin the party. While there are only 3 initial choices, they are specifically designed to cater to any use case of the party feature.

Once the party has started, your guests are able to join in. The example prototype shown displays a party where the host is in control, from the hosts perspective. The music queue is created with suggested songs from the guests, but in this party, the host is able to either accept or decline the suggested tunes. 

Reflection

If We Had More Time

As this project was a design jam, the timeframe was very limited. This meant the project was very light on any user research and focused primarily on ideation, problem solving, and UI design abilities. I would've liked to conduct user interviews in the empathizing phase and run user testing with the final designs.

Light Mode

The preference for music applications is dark themes, but many of them still incorporate an option for a light mode. I would've liked to design the app with both a dark mode and light mode option.