I designed, FeelBeats, a music streaming platform that focuses on elicitating listeners’
feelings of music and encouraging feeling-centered sharing between listeners and
artists.

To learn about musicians’ routines and the relationship between musicians and listeners, I began to conduct online secondary research and exemplar study, attend and observe local live music performance events, and interview musicians (also including music students and ex-musicians).

To learn about how listeners generate feedback, I conducted interviews, yet discovered that when listening to music online, many listeners seldom have serious attempts to write and think of writing music reactions due to barriers of both lack of motivation and lack of confidence to produce:

From the research, i synethsized and summarized the key value of musicians and listeners: what are most important to them in feedback generation and sharing. Musicians are looking for feedback of high value and quality, while listeners are looking for low barrier and more motivations of producing feedback.

I brainstormed rounds of ideas regarding feedback generation and sharing mechanisms, and analyze them based on their value to musicians, and the perceived barrier of producing to listeners.

I drafted out the wireframes capturing the core idea and flow of (1) listener composing feelings of music, (2) listener discovering others’ feelings of music, (3) for musicians to react to listeners’ feelings.

As a content platform, motivating people to share more and share better is the most important thing.

Based on research and brainstorming, I worked on improving the flow of composing music feedback by considering use cases. I categorized the timing when a listener has strong feelings of music into 3 cases:

To meet the needs of different cases and users, I simplified and broke the big feedback composition chunk into (1.) Building atmosphere collage using provided vibe stickers, (2.) Compose thoughts with visuals and lyrics as inspiration and prompts to faciliate natural experience.

Listeners read and write for resonance: I use feelings as the medium that carry music to people. Everyday, listeners wil receive a list of music for discovery that match feelings expressed previously.

I design to use proper social features to encourage (1) expression sharing, and
(2) feeling-centered music spreading, viewing, and searching.

For the musician interaction part, I design to complete the feedback cycle between musicians and listeners: (1) for musicians to show their thoughts, (2) for musicians to add listener feedback to collection for future usages, (3) and to provide incentives for listeners to engage more.

In the future, more work can be done on investigating how the valuable data which was gathered in the app can be utilized in various ways. For example, for musicians, it provides them with promotional resources, just to name a few:

With a deeper understanding of musicians, listeners are more likely to support them, which can help upcoming musicians to build an audience base. These usages all have the potential to help both the music and musicians themselves gain popularity in a way that do not require compromises in music-making for commercial purposes and, thus, can improve both the mental and financial well-being of musicians.

I also envisioned the scenarios where the visual experience crafted by listeners can be enpowered by tangible experience devices such as projectors. Designing for immersive experience to maximize the impact of users’ atmospheres to inspire and engage more people into music enjoying and expression.