Moosic is a social network app for music lovers and upcoming artists. Music is a great medium that allows people to connect themselves to their personal feelings, experiences, and memories. Music also has the ability to deeply affect our mental states and raise our mood. As a result, music is great way to create community bonds between people. The app will allow people with similar music interests to interact online and share music streaming in real time, while simultaneously allowing people to share the mood/emotional state they are in.
Create and Ideate : An initial concept was sketched out.
Competitive Analysis : A thorough examination of existing apps to bottlenecks and gaps of improvement.
Research and Persona Development : Performed a first-click test and conducted a short focus group session with other students. Then created a detailed persona based on user group needs.
Iterative Design : More prototypes were developed from the initial sketches.
In my competitive analysis I was able to find two apps that design social interaction around music: Spotify, Airbuds. Both these apps have limitations and restrict users from building genuine connections around social interactions. With Spotify users can only see what friends are listening to and they can not chat or interact with them. On Airbuds, users can interact and comment but the amount of media and interactions are limited as well.
To push the idea further I sketched a few screens centered around the following tasks : Updating your feed, Engaging with a post, Commenting on posts, Direct messaging and Search/Browse.
I recruited a group of friends and performed a first click test with them to assess the path that users take to complete a series of tasks. These tasks included : creating a new post, changing moods and where to access profile settings.
I also conducted a focus group with other students in my HCI program and asked questions regarding user moods, notification features and profiles settings. Some features that were mentioned in the focus group session was sharing playlist/searching for 'music moodboards' created by other users, song of the day notifications, user top artists and nearby listening party events.
These are transitions from the mid-fidelity screen to the hi-fidelity of the final prototype based on the initial sketched interactions and tasks
Notifications are split between into two categories. The 'General' category is where users can view notifications from friends and other general users of the app. The 'Music' category displays notifications/alerts regarding music and other information about similar music interests.
Users are able to connect and disconnect streaming services such as Spotify, Apple Music, Soundcloud and Audiomack.
Since users mentioned in the focus group that they would like to see the top songs of their friends. When accessing a user's profile, there is a tab called 'Top Songs' that will display users most listened to songs while accessing the app.
