BeatStreet
App Concept, UI/UX Design, Branding
BeatStreet is a location-based procedural music generator. The app feeds metrics like the street you're on, the current weather, the city you're in, and the speed at which you're moving into an algorithm, that returns unique pieces of music for every street in every city.
BeatStreet is produced by a four-person team in my Interface Design class, called Angry Monkey Studios.
Here's how it works.
Listen
Choose your mode of transportation and BeatStreet generates a beat the name of the street you’re on, the temperature, and your speed.
Mix
BeatStreet saves the beats you’ve collected by traveling and allows you to create mixes with all the loops you’ve collected.
Browse
You can listen to popular mixes by other users, favorite mixes, and follow users.
Target Users
Although Colin is a early adopter of audio apps, he can’t spring for expensive electronics. He uses intro-level software and hardware to play music for his friends and local parties. Colin rides his bicycle around the Pitt Campus.
Janice is an active member of her College Radio, she loves to write articles about school life. Recently, Janice started to do some videos for friends, and uses Audacity to mix audio.
Dan has a fairly successful party DJ career. Recently, he has begun crowdsourcing beats from local BeatStreet users to play at his parties. He even encourages party attendees to send him beats while he DJ’s so he can add them to his mix on the fly.
Process
Here's the crack team of designers I worked with on this project. That's me reading a book in a Macy's on the right over there.
High Level Insights
1. PEOPLE GET SICK OF THE SAME MUSIC.
2. PEOPLE LIKE APPS THAT REACT TO THE ENVIRONMENT AROUND THEM.
3. PEOPLE ENJOY DISCOVERY AND SHARING OF MUSIC.
We created an information architecture that demonstrates all of BeatStreet's features.
We're currently producing a prototype in proto.io to demonstrate the way BeatStreet is designed to work. We've also figured out how the app will look. Our visual style is defined by a color palette that is inspired by nightlife but designed to look good in both light and dark themes.
The next step is to perform heuristic evaluations and user testing to get the prototype to be the best it can be. If the app still shows promise at that stage our team will seek a developer to code it.