PRODUCT DESIGN, iOS, WEB, 2018

YouSound – A digital platform for artists, brands, and labels to create income without compromise

The core idea was born out of necessity. Our client identified the struggles that artists encounter every day with the current music industry that benefits mostly fans, with streaming services either advertisement-supported or subscription-based. Most musicians are not making a fair living from these services.

The client decided to build a platform to serve as a tool to sustain a creative career, giving artists, brands, and labels unprecedented control of their content, presenting them with an opportunity to create income without compromise.

The challenge is to design a product that helps empower the music community with permission-based features for content & interactions that allow users to enjoy engaging experiences based on their music preferences. They can also support their favorite artists and brands by reposting content or purchasing their merch while downloading any music for free.

Project Details

1. Goal

To design a web interface product and a mobile app that empowers the music community to build a new economy to drive more revenue for everyone, giving verified artists, brands, and labels unprecedented control of their content.

2. The Challenge

How might we help build an ethical and sustainable digital community for artists, brands, and labels to create income without compromise while allowing all fans to consume music for free and even earn money for sharing content they love?

3. Deliverable

Design a web product tailored for artists to upload music to a user-facing player interface that lives both on the browser and native mobile apps. Additionally, an e-commerce experience with a fast checkout integration from Stripe for verified artists, brands, and labels to sell digital and physical products and services to the users on the platform.

Who Are We Designing For?

Listener

From having access to exclusive content plus the ability to download any song on the platform for free, users can also make money by promoting content from verified artists, brands, and labels they love.

Artist

Verified artists are the essence of the platform. They create, share and control their content entirely without restriction, as everything has to be copyrighted. They can collaborate to generate shared revenue.

Brand

Brands can sell products & services, playing an important role when collaborating with artists, labels, and other brands to create and sell products fairly and easily.

Label

Similar to brands, verified labels can sell physical and digital products. Their role is equally important to help build a new economy to disrupt the music industry.

User Journey

We mapped out the journey of all the personas to increase visibility. As a result, we generated a flow chart to serve as another tool to reassure our decisions more holistically.

First Time User Experience

The welcoming experience introduces the differentiators of the platform by onboarding the users and teaching them more about the main values tailored for each persona.

Through images, iconography, and simple messaging, we explain to the user what it means to be part of the community.

As the user swipes between views, parts of the content are delivered at a different speed to generate a smooth parallax effect.

Defining Your Music Preference

The second step of the signup process is to tell the platform what interests you the most in music by selecting your favorite genres. It is also possible to be very precise and dive into subgenres to find a specific style. As a team, we explore a few different concepts to create a fun yet straightforward user experience. Below are some of the prototypes we built to run user tests.

We want the users to feel in control of choosing the music they want to listen to and everything they want to see related to it. All they need to do is to place the genres they love by dragging them close to the orbit heart.

Another approach we explored will seem pretty familiar to Apple Music users. Each genre is shown in a circle, and in addition, we associated a unique color with each of them.

By tapping in a circle, it moves up and becomes a pill to indicate the selected state. Long pressing in a genre will display all its subgenres allowing the user to be even more precise about the music content they want to consume on the platform.

Discover Music

The Discover page is the home for new content. With a self-adapting system that learns about users' preferences, it only recommends the content to the people who really want it. At every refresh, new stuff will come up.

Stream shows all the new content posted by the artists, brands, and labels you follow. From Live videos and new albums to collaboration merch and fresh playlists. If you want to get specific, you can set different search parameters, including genres, username, price, etc. There are plenty of curation possibilities.

Activities view shows all the updates related to you and everything that interests you, posted by who you follow.

All this experience is possible while listening to music, thanks to the omnipresent FAB on the bottom right of the screen that can easily open the player screen by tapping on it.

Creating A New Economy

This allows every user to send & receive payments. Giving all users the ability to make money enables the community to support each other.

Verified Artists, Brands & Labels can sell physical and digital products. Buyers can add items to their cart from multiple sellers and check out at once.

Signing Up – Artists, Brands & Labels

A human verifies each artist. Brands & Labels must complete the verification steps online to sell their product and services – this ensures a legal & high-quality experience. The process is a lot faster with a verified user's invitation.

Music Player Interface

The music player was designed to be visually exciting and easy to use. The interface background changes to become more unified with the album cover to create a more unique and branded experience for the listener. As the community grows, the platform will eventually become an immensely comprehensive library, with options for music lovers of every genre.

Albums, Merch, Playlists & Live Video Streams can be reposted by any user, allowing verified accounts to maximize their reach, create sophisticated release cycles, and push previously released content back into the Stream.

Dream Team

Diego Costa

• Product Design
• Art Direction
• Illustration
• Branding

Geovani Almeida

• Product Design
• Branding

Jardson Almeida

• Product Design
• Interaction Design
• UX Writing
• Branding

CONSIDERATIONS

The first version of this project was designed 2017, and a year later, we were contacted again to improve the brand and user experience. Compared to what was done initially, we proposed a vibrant and slick brand identity to ensure a more modern look and feel redesign that the audience was looking for.

Social

Contact

hello@jardsonalmeida.com

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