What’s In My Mind When Designing SmartShare Music Box?

Hi everyone! This is UXer Talks. This time we have the senior PM, “old man”, here with us. He will share his designing ideas of SmartShare, an outstanding design work in the Mockplus UX contest in 2017. Here we have a customized music life for you. Just come and enjoy it!

In this age of big data, products know more and more about their users. No matter it’s a car, or just an App, can track your habits and know your preferences. Then you gradually found that, as long as you open Amazon, there are clothes you fancy. As long as you open Youtube, there are videos you like. As long as you open Quora, all the questions recommended are exactly what trouble you. There’s no denying that tech has helped us to save a lot of time. It seems that the ideal life is closer and closer. And among thousands of these smart products, there’s a box, which is designed for your customized music life. That is “SmartShare” music box.

You don’t have to open your search engine since “SmartShare” is just a concept product now. It’s specially designed by “Old Man” for participating in 2017 Mockplus UX contest. Don’t be disappointed since on this “entries show” page, you can view this whole prototype and give it a try. Now, click https://www.mockplus.cn/ux2017/show/DtRct. Let’s play this App, and at the same time, listen to “Old Man” to tell his stories about it.

“When designing this App, what I want to do is to give users a kind of enjoyment, which comes from a music player that knows you.”

“I like to listen to music on the way home. This is a common habit. But every time I have to search in the App for a long time to find an appropriate one for my mood at that time. I was longing for such an App, which recommends me exactly the music I like every time I open it, so I don’t have to waste that time. ”

“This reminds me of making an App that can record your using habits. I mean, you preferred music type at different time in a day. In this way you will find the music you love at the first time you open the music player. For those who use it for the first time, SmartShare recommends him the one favored by other people who have similarities with him. For example, they are both teen girl, something like that.”

Sounds like the common music recommendation feature of mainstream music players?

Very different. It’s true that the music recommendation feature can meet users’ needs to some extent in this aspect, but users cannot manually set their own changing like-list.

How does “Box” customize music for you?

At the beginning, there are 4 points in my mind, they are when, where, who and what. As for “who”, the user can be a man or woman, girl or boy. As for “what”, I can tell from the time. You know, usually people do the same thing at some specific time. For instance, morning is corresponding to breakfast, evening is corresponding to sleeping. However people usually spend their weekends in a different way. So the weekends are totally for users to design.

Besides, I add weather in the first page. When you brush your in the morning, it’s good to know about today’s weather while listening to the music inspires you most. Later maybe I will add dressing tips in SmartShare.

For those who get bed from the wrong side, try to start your day with music. (That’s very effective.) Music players like box can not only recommends you beautiful music, but also the weather and dressing tips. That’s awesome, right?

Which design details are for better user experience?

Every detail of Box is designed to reduce users’ operations. Most of the buttons can be reached with your thumb. They are designed as big as possible, and there’re no extra decorations.

A big difference with mainstream music player is that, people can adjust the sound effect in SmartShare. This feature is for various occasions and atmosphere, additionally, I want to collect users’ actions on this page and find out what they love. This feature may have lower usage rate. It’s just for those who have higher requirements on sound effects, and used in some certain occasions.

It seems that the feature of sound effect adjustment are not so practical compared to others, I still believe that, as people has increasing demands on music quality, this feature may become a must some day in the future.

“SmartShare” has clean interface and unique features, which has attracted a lot pf attentions. The author , Old Man, is a senior user of Mockplus. He starts to use the tool in 2015. For him, it’s not the result of this contest matters most, but the process of transferring his ideas to visible products. Besides, he had been expecting to compete with other master-hands for a long time.

The Mockplus UX Contest in 2017 is held by Jongde Software, for celebrating the 3rd anniversary of Mockplus and encouraging UX/UI designers abroad to show their design talents and make some innovations. Perhaps later on the winner list you can find the most potential designer in the world.

More details about the Contest: www.mockplus.cn/ux2017