SoundCloud.
Music Interaction that Flows.
What is Soundcloud?
Soundcloud is a relatively well-known application that many people use to upload their own audios and music. As a music lover myself, I do use this application for listening to self-produced music that isn't generally found on other platforms.
Cleaning up Actions
There are numerous interactions within the application that lack intuitively and carry the app in an unnecessarily disorganized way. We spoke to SoundCloud users to break down their issues within the application and found that there were several interactions that could be cleaned up.
We spoke to multiple people to more deeply understand the direction that we needed to take this project into.
The general demographic of our interviewees included students who described basic interactions they would have with the app, making our assessment based on helping users navigate around the issues that they were commonly faced with it.
Meet the Users
Pain Points
After interviewing our users, we were able to formulate a basic outline of all the concepts we found to be consistently brought up with the different users. These insights were further used to draft pain points for the fixes that we could bring to the SoundCloud interface on each page. We identified the issues that seemed to resurface and brainstormed ways to provide users with physical adjustments to the interface.
Low Fidelity
After figuring out the fixes that we planned to implement, we created low-fidelity sketches to succinctly depict the changes we decided on.
Wireframes
Whilst maintaining SoundCloud's brand, we managed to piece together solid wireframes for the applications reconstruction. My partner and I worked together to negotiate the ideal constraints and designs we would have to make in order for the application to keep its originality intact.
This project focused on 2 main aspects, both being very different from one another.
The first focal point was the concept that the smallest of designs can impact a user's experience in the strongest ways. Our ideation and sketches involved a great deal of recycling what was already embedded into the app, which led to our goal being to find the most fluid direction for users to navigate SoundCloud.
Reflections
Fluidity and intuitively within the placement of the application's features may seem like a small aspect that could be easily fixed, but there is more to it than simply relocating a button. My main takeaway from this is that user flows and understanding the viewpoint of the user can create huge differences even if the action that is being fixed is small in itself.
The second one was working with a partner. This was my first redesign in which I've collaborated with a fellow designer. My previous works mainly involved working with myself, which was definitely not as humbling as an experience as this. My partner was very quick to understand my style of running user interviews and iterating designs while working alongside one another. A lot of negotiation and compromising was involved to meet each other halfway when it came to deciding what was best for the application. It was a great project to expand my team-working skills on and I can definitely see my partner creating many more noteworthy projects in the future.