There are only 3 week remaining for us interns, which is a little scary and a little sad! But if the next few weeks are as productive as this past week, we’re on track to turn out a pretty good product by the end of our time here at MxM.
The alpha version of our product— which is, for the time being, affectionately called DJ Manny— has been already making its rounds in the studio. It’s done a fair job providing the soundtrack for working in the office, and for a few of our weekend activities as well.
I spent last week working on nailing down the holistic DJ Manny experience (we’ll think about changing the name eventually, we promise). If you’ve been following along with my blog, you’ve heard quite a bit about the challenge of how the trail of the music that you have already listened to is recorded.
The next iteration of our product will incorporate a new solution to recording listening history. We found that, even in our own use of the app, ending the current listening session by looking at your “journey” felt like an unnecessary extra screen in-between ending a session and starting a new one. It didn’t make sense for users to be looking at the music they had been listening to after they decided to end their session— rather, it made more sense for them to see the journey while listening.
Another benefit to seeing history within the current listening session is that a user can choose to jump back and play from a previous song, then continue the journey from there— this, as Will put it, gives you the option to course correct if your journey goes askew. This would work especially well if we have the time to implement a favoriting feature.
If we choose to go forward with this take on listening history, we have to design 3 fundamental screens: the start/restart screen, the player screen, and the history screen. A short session with the designers of the NYC studio (Tom, Adam, Will) helped give me a direction on how to handle these 3 screens both architecturally and aesthetically.
I’ve been working with Keynote to create animated prototypes of the proposed interactions and experiences. Here are some examples of a few:
Start/Restart Your Listening Session
View your Listening History In-Session
End Session By Starting a New One
In these prototypes, songs are represented by squares. We like the idea of songs being visually represented as objects, as we want the experience to be tactile, and having colorful, touchable, and obviously movable elements on the screen enforces this.
I’ll spend some more time this week thinking about visual style and mood. It’ll be fun to give some DJ Manny personality— that is, until we come up with a better name!
