Muxify

A fresh approach to finding music by exploring your music DNA and tapping into the musical tastes of your friends.

Sharing music used to mean making mixtapes of your favorite tunes and giving the tapes to your friends. Now it's much harder to share music or explore your friend's taste in music.

Goal and Role

The goal of this project was to create a way of exploring your friend's music to discover new artists based on your preferences.

The original concept was brought to me by a developer friend who really enjoys music and disocvering new artists. Since then, life has gotten in the way, but I have still noodled on the project over time.

Role: UX Design, Research, Prototypes

Research

Since this project began as a passion project, the research focused more on what exists and what we wish we had

We decided that there were 2 things we wanted to focus on:

  1. Discovering New Music

  2. Making the perfect playlist between two people

Many of our initial sketches focused on user flow and basic layouts. Some of these included a lot of unnecessary features and extra details.

We decided to focus much more on only the necessary features to get the app off the ground, leaving more advanced features and control to after we get the basics functioning.

First Concepts

One of our first concepts resembled too much of a full purpose music streaming app with access to explore everything about an artist or album, and only a few unique pages that would be about exploring your friend’s music taste.

Another early concept saw the use of a home page that showed the user the rough makeup of their “liked” songs and playlists.

It was at this point that my friend who was the developer and music afficiando wanted to pivot a bit into an app focused more on the social aspect of seeing what your friends are listening to at the time.

In the more social version, the user is greeted and can see what their friends are currently listening to, then have the option to create a playlist with them.

It was in this iteration that we started playing with the concept of adjustable sliders that allow the user to play more of their own music, or their friend’s in the playlist, or to adjust how different from their own interests the music from their friend’s playlist could be.

We played around with an extremely pared down version that only displayed a user’s friends and allowed them to pick one to make a playlist with.

Interestingly, around this time Spotify created a similar feature, though the application of it was somewhat clunky and wouldn’t try to match your genres. It would simply take what you are currently listening to the most and combine it with what your friend is listening to the most - not always making musical magic.

After creating a three part onboarding illustration, I had new perspective and wanted to shift back to some of the original purpose of the application

Explorations

Anecdotally, I know that people love the Wrapped that Spotify does at the end of the year because it allows every user to see some of the data about what they listen to, which can be fascinating.

I knew I wanted to keep this as a main draw for Muxify, being able to look at some of the data of what you listen to.

At first, I really liked the concept of “your music DNA” and leaned into a design that is reminiscent of ancestry results and things people are familiar with.

The more I worked on it, the less I liked exactly how much data was thrown at the user, and not in a friendly way.

It shows how many friends have music in the genre the user is looking at, but when it comes down to the data shown, it doesn’t really matter.

Final Concept

In my final conept, the user’s homepage shows a general overview of how the main genres breakdown across their music. They have a few stats and can see the most recent playlists they’ve made, as well as a few friends they’ve added.

By selecting the genre they are looking at, they can see a breakdown of that genre. At either level, the user can make a new playlist.

I think that this graphic is easy to understand and use, would evoke some nostalgia from spinning the wheel to change genres. I imagine that the switch between genres would have haptic feedback .

Once a user selects to make a playlist from a genre they’re exploring, they are greeted with a page showing friends that have some amount of the same genre.

By dragging and scrolling through friends, they can see how much overlap over artists and songs they have with their friends in that genre.

The two sliders allow the user to adjust how much of the music will be new, or how similar it will be. We found through conversations that a lot of people will turn off playlists that aren’t familiar at all. They liked to have some things that were familiar between tracks that were new to them.

At the bottom, the user is given a preview of what the playlist might be when matching with each friend, and adjusting the sliders.

Reflections

I believe the concept behind Muxify is really interesting and people would enjoy being able to explore their own music through this method.

A lot more user testing and trial and error would need to occur to land on the perfect data visual for the homepage, as well as figuring out navigation for diving deeper and deeper into your own music.

I have loved the challenge as someone who doesn’t go out of their way to discover new music. Finding the balance between being intricate enough for music lovers, but simple enough for less musically motivated people is the hardest part.