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SoundCloud for Artists by Artists Goal
Increase collaboration between musicians on the SoundCloud web platform. Delivering a near term solution and painting a vision for the future.
Problem Statement
Most musicians who sign up to the SoundCloud web platform abandon it within about one year. There is also a lack of collaborative platforms where musicians can share projects with each other and get feedback to improve their content for their listeners.
Research
I started the research off by interviewing musicians about their experience with SoundCloud. I then looked into the company's core value and compared them to the core value that musicians saw in SoundCloud.
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How Might We?
I developed some "how might we?" questions based of off the micro-interaction of uploading. I wanted to take the action of uploading and explore how I could expand it to promote collaboration and critique in between musicians to create better content for listeners.
Current State Diagram
In order to redesign SoundCloud's web interface to face the musicians, I created a state diagram to see what I could rearrange and simplify to make the navigation easier and more familiar for musicians.
Future State Diagram
I then redesigned the current state diagram into a potential future state diagram to show the simplification of the redesigned web interface as well as the interaction of new features.
Ideation and Wireframes
Final Redesign Solution
For the final redesign, I decided to focus on the micro-interaction of uploading and how I could reinvent the action to be useful for musicians. I redesigned the interface of the SoundCloud homepage so that it faces the musicians rather than the listeners. Musicians can now share feedback and inspirations with each other by uploading suggestive tracks, samples, and audio files that can be retrieved from their SoundCloud Drive.
This is a video demonstration of the homepage of the SoundCloud redesign into a collaborative and explorative tool specifically for musicians.
In the SoundCloud Drive, musicians can store personal and collaborative projects where they can add as many collaborators as they want and see feedback from musicians they are collaborating with. They can also upload, store, and share their audio files and projects as well as build a collection of samples for inspiration.
This is a video demonstration of the navigation through SoundCloud Drive.
Future State: What SoundCloud could potentially be in the future
SoundCloud VR is a concept that I decided to explore and visualize as a conceptual future state that could possibly happen 5-7 years from now.
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The SoundCloud Portal
The portal is a feature that pushes the user into Soundcloud VR. This button stays in the same place while the user can scroll up and down the page. However close this button is to a cloud tag is the proximity of how close the user will be to the dimension of a certain genre and the song when they enter the virtual space of SoundCloud VR.
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SoundCloud VR Visualization
This is a visualization of SoundCloud in VR. I wanted to play with how a song would be visualized as a physical matter with elements of a song that can be removed, listened to and taken out of the virtual space and be put into the user's SoundCloud Drive
This is a demonstration the user approaching a song. As the user would get closer to a song, the volume of it would increase.
Storyboard
I created different storyboards to not only to explore the different possible interactions within SoundCloud VR, but to also visualize and organize the interactions in a chronological order.
SoundCloud VR Demonstration
This is a demonstration of how the user would interact with a song in SoundCloud VR.
Value Flow
I decided to create a diagram that shows how the redesigned SoundCloud web platform could provide value for stakeholders within the music industry.
