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Description
The first step in this project was to analyse what other music apps do well and what could be improved. From this, I recognised a lack of personalisation across all major music apps. As a highly personal medium, music has always been associated with personal tastes. It used to be that users would customise their vinyl setup, decorate their Walkman, or choose unique cases for their iPods. My music app sought to change that.
My concept was to have a customisable player screen within my music app, giving users the same visual personalisation they had with previous methods of listening to music. To explore this further, I mind-mapped what options and customisations should be included in the app.
The next step was to sketch out wireframes of what I wanted my music app to look like. I initially started with the base three screens; home, search, and library; before moving onto the player screen and what the customisation screens would look like. After sketching the screens, I listed what icons I would need and then sketched them too.
One of the main options I wanted for users was to be able to change their music visuals. Album art is the standard, but I also wanted to add the option for vinyl, cd, and cassette, however, I also had the idea that users could expand the album art to the full screen using AI outcropping. I explored this option in DALL.E 2 and it seemed to work well and would be a unique feature of the app.
Other customisation included; font style; primary and secondary colour; background pattern; and icon style.
As another unique aspect of the app, rather than having the player bar that usually sits at the bottom of the screen when not in the player, the app would have a square player which can be dragged around the screen. This would also stay on screen when out of the app and reflect the user's customised player screen.
Next, I began to build the screens in Figma and design an icon set. I kept the colour palette fairly simple, as I wanted the non-background colours to be the users chosen primary colour, to keep the personalisation through all screens in some way.
The final step here was to build a prototype in Figma. This was fairly tricky as I hadn’t much experience and really pushed myself to prototype as far as possible.
I was really pleased with this project as I really feel I achieved what I set out to do. I think personalisation within music players is something we’ve lost and was really happy to be able to find a way to bring it back.
