2016 / ucreate.it
DiscMuseum - discover and organize your classical music collections
As a music lover (also classical), I had a chance to work on my very first subscription-based music player aka Spotify for Bach.
Goals
Our team's goals were to create a mobile version of an already existing web platform for browsing and listening to classical music. Our customer was based in Paris, France so most of the planning was done remotely.
Challenges
As for me, as a designer, it was a new challenge of proposing an improved experience for listeners and solving problems of upselling subscriptions and communicating about the service's trial period. Another challenge was to create a playback experience that is significantly different from the typical music players (e.g. Spotify, which is more structured towards Playlists, Albums and singles). Classical music is much more complex: a composition is created by a composer, each composition has parts that can be performed by a different performer in different years.
Process
My process was very straightforward: gathering requirements, which was already simplified by a fact of the existence of the current web-based experience. Most of my task was to scope them out for the mobile experience with the project manager and dev team. Critical tasks and features were confirmed with the client and as soon as we had a confirmation we proceed with design, testing and development.
Onboarding new and exisiting users.
News from the (old) world. The founder of the app said that most of the users like to read facts and stories about composers. This is why we came up with the News of the week.
A Spotify for Back couldn't work with the player and its queue. That might be the trickiest part as composition doesn't work like regular albums and songs. The work can be split into compositions and compositions has many parts, and then each part can be conducted by a different orchestra in a 20-30 years span.
This can happen sometimes...
If connection restored, users could browse among hundreds of popular compositor and browse his/her catalogue of works.
For less classical music-savvy people, there was an option to shuffle by using radio where the app grouped works and compositions into moods.
My role as UX/UI Designer at ucreate.it
London / Oct 2015 — Oct 2017
Working at ucreate.it gave me an opportunity to collaborate with an incredible team of product managers and developers for many different startups that we helped validate by researching, rapid prototyping, testing and implementing.