Making SoundCloud the Medium of music
As you may know there are a few things I have a passion for: Design, usability and music. Smart software. Bringing digital features to the non-digital world. Building things. Connecting things. And Schnitzel. But this is not about Schnitzel.
About SoundCloud
SoundCloud is a web-platform for uploading and sharing your own music. At least that’s what I remember SoundCloud to be. To be honest I didn’t use it for some time now, and I think that’s sad.
Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t lose my passion for music or the web. I write a lot of material, some of it is even digital so there’s not much stopping me from uploading it so SoundCloud. But I stopped enjoying my time on SoundCloud.
Why’s that? To be honest I don’t have a single answer for that. But when I log into SoundCloud and watch my stream there is so much going on visually that I don’t know where to look at.
Maybe that’s because the stream-page offers information for two audiences:
- The consumer who follows artists and wants to listen to music
- The musician who wants to know who listened to his songs and get statistics
Comparison with Medium
When you log into Medium and just look at the first page it’s super simple while still offering a lot of things to discover.
- Tabs for looking at different stories (does anyone get why “Recommended” changes the whole layout below but the other menu items don’t?)
- “Write here…” for easy publishing
- Some articles pushed from the staff of Medium
- Featured tags
- Top stories on Medium
That’s beautifully simple, yet offers enough options to discover interesting content to spend the whole day reading.
Focus.
The main difference is that Medium focusses on specific tasks, while SoundCloud let’s you do almost anything right from a teaser of a song. That doesn’t have to be bad if that is what your users want. And without research I can’t tell you if there even is a problem for SoundCloud or if their current site is the perfect solution for the needs of it’s users.
But being someone who has a thing or two for simplicity I gave myself 2 hours to create something different. By setting yourself a time limit you have to focus on the aspects that are crucial.
Ok, let’s have a look at what I came up with after 2 hours in Sketch:
I started with a more simple logo than the one currently in use on the website and added the icons for notifications, chat and profile. The search is places in the upper right.
The main navigation only consists of 3 items: Latest (currently “Stream”), Explore and Collections.
There’s also a round orange element in the upper right you may recognize when you’re familiar with Google’s Material Design — it’s called the “floating action button” and allows you to access the main feature (uploading something) from every page.
By using color sparely I was able to use the trademark orange for spots you should look at. The content itself shows larger covers for the songs you want to listen to and get’s rid of most of the other interactive elements currently in use. It’s focused on “play” and “view post” — and I added the known three dots for more possible elements like adding the item to a collection.
I spent about 90 of my 120 minutes on the design of this simple module. And it took me about 60 minutes until I realized that I’m heading the wrong way by thinking “what else can I add” instead of “what can I leave out”. But that’s how designing works, isn’t it?
The sidebar only shows a welcome and uses “Hej” for salutation to show the swedish roots of founders Alexander Ljung and Eric Wahlforss. Below is a teaser-text for SoundCloud’s premium model called “Go Pro” and three items for “trending music” and “who to follow”.
Did you see that music got square covers and users got round avatars? I love those small details.
The player at the bottom stayed like it is, I only added some transparency to the background.
As you can see I was able to remove a lot of the clutter by simply focussing on what’s important on this page: Listening to the latest tracks.
I have a dozen more ideas for what to do with other pages, but that has to wait a bit.
There’s this other idea deep in my head I came up with a few years ago: How about building a device — like a stomp box/guitar effect — that can connect with your SoundCloud account? That could fill the gap between your analog music and the digital world. Or even offer live streams from your rehearsal space.
