Begin Journey: The Alpha Version and Next Steps
Week 8 in Review
As of last week, the alpha mobile version of our application is live on both Dory’s and my phones! The days leading up to the completion of alpha have really been Dory’s time to shine. The resources powering our application have presented quite a few obstacles in the creation of the initial logical framework for the music player, and Dory came up with very clever solutions to make the resources work for us. Thanks to her hard work and patience, we’ve got a pretty impressive first take on the mobile version!
We worked out a pretty good system for making the product together, especially considering neither of us have built an iOS application before. I designed the necessary screens in Keynote, then saved them to a shared Dropbox folder. From there, Dory implemented the design.
Here is an example of how a Keynote schematic became the working application. On the left is the Keynote screen; on the right is a screenshot of the live application on my iPhone 4s.
For now, the app is a lot of fun to use, especially due to its sheer novelty. It’s quite interesting to explore by genre— in the mood for some “quiet storm”, “dansband”, or “stomp & holler”? Our app has got you covered.
Dory built the alpha version with the expectation that most of the initial logic will remain the same in future iterations of the product, but on the design side, we’ll be more or less scrapping the alpha interface and starting from scratch. As it currently exists, paths are selected within the player with buttons. I spent some time this week thinking about different path selection solutions. We want the selection mechanic to encourage exploration, and be fluid enough for quick, frequent path switches.
Here’s an example of a suggested interface, in which a maximum of two paths can be selected by simply scrubbing through the visible menu:
The lines to the left of the white song box indicate what path(s) resulted in the current song; the dog-ear in the upper right corner of the song box indicate a “favorited” or “saved-for-later” song.
Of course, this design has a long way to go in terms of usability, and Dory and I know pretty much nothing about animation for iOS, but we’re very interested in gesture interaction.
We’ll be playing around with the alpha version quite a bit this week. Our next step is to get the application on the rest of the studio’s phones, and in front of more users, to get a more complete idea of what people want to see and use before we start building the beta version. We’re excited to know what others think of the product so far!
