Soundwave
2020
Design Process, Context, and Systems
Music-sharing app for those who want to discover new songs, artists, and fans
Soundwave is a music sharing app geared towards people who want to give and receive personalized music recommendations that suit a variety of situations and preferences. It allows users to create collaborative playlists and publish them online, giving others the ability to add their favorite songs. The app assigns genre tags to each song and playlist so users can receive more relevant search results and recommendations. This reduces the amount of work they need to do to discover music that meets their tastes, no matter how specific.
Prior to designing Soundwave’s features and key screens, I conducted interviews with peers and professors within Northeastern’s College of Arts, Media, and Design to identify their needs and frustrations with the current solutions. Through these interviews, I learned that music fulfilled several important roles in their lives and that they were frustrated about the amount of work they had to put in to search for new music. In addition, they found that the best recommendations came from friends with similar tastes. From these insights, I aimed to create a centralized location for people to discover new music by sharing their recommendations with others based on the descriptions of each playlist.
Upon opening the app, the user sees a discovery page displaying automatically generated song and playlist recommendations. The collapsible megamenu allows them to navigate between screens and access a variety of features such as the “playlist requests” and profile features. Users can create playlists and connect with others in several ways, either by reaching out to them directly or adding to a public playlist. New playlists are created in a group-chat-style format, where users populate their playlist by DM-ing 1 or more recipients a song. After making the playlist public, it can appear on other users’ “discover” page. Users can also directly request a recommendation from a frequent listener of a genre on other people’s profile pages. The profile page displays a user’s top genres in a pie chart, which increases visibility of others with similar tastes.
