The Idea: Described
Week 4 in Review
Our first couple weeks at Made by Many have been all about ideas— proposing them, expanding them, refining them, revisiting them, presenting them, and trashing them. We’ve cycled through a number of ideas, ranging from the very ridiculous to the very specific. Spending time with all of these “so-crazy-it-just-might-work” ideas became the safe route. But we started this past week, for the first time, focused on one idea.
Our intention was to give this idea a lot of space to mature, change, or even fail. We put the concept in front of strangers on the street, the rest of the New York studio, and some folks in the London studio.
We realize we haven’t actually described The Idea yet in our blog series, and actually being able to in a substantial way was one of this week’s greatest challenges. Every time we introduced it to a stranger or peer, it became a five-minute spiel that relied way too much on theoretical tangents and hand gestures.
Tom also suggested that we were getting caught up in creating an interface rather than providing a solution, and encouraged us to write out what we were trying to do. So, in parallel to creating a few basic clickable prototypes with Flinto (check ‘em out on Dory’s blog post), we spent some time really nailing down the language and, as a result, our intent. We put together a few paragraphs in the style of the one-page website product launch cliché. Here’s what we came up with:
As you listen, build musical journeys that you’ll want to revisit.
Your music listening experience should be about the moment. [Our App Name] allows you to create a soundtrack for tomorrow, and an account of yesterday, one step at a time.
Choose your point of origin: a song or artist that you want to hear now. Then, decide what to hear next based on what you like about the current song. Think of it as a thoughtful shuffle— you’ll be forging a curated route through your music library without losing the serendipity of randomness. Control your route based on artist, tempo, genre, city, or year, and change the direction of your exploration as often as you’d like. As you go, [Our App Name] records your journey as an playlist that you can edit, enjoy, and share.
An effortless interface allows your music to change as quickly as your mood and mind does. This makes your casual listening sessions more meaningful.
This summary, however, doesn’t address the potential depth of the app’s functionality. I jotted down all the things I believe the app needs to do, then put together a quick Keynote prototype that represented how these actions would interact in a flow.
Here, each function is represented as a button that advances the prototype, but our ultimate goal is to create a more fluid relationship between all of these elements. This prototype is not an example of an interface, but rather a map of what we would hope to achieve with this product.
We’d love to hear your feedback on our work thus far. Feel free to leave notes on our blog posts, or tweet at Dory and me!
