Interactive learning at Experience Music Project

Experience Music Project is a music museum located in Seattle. A few steps from the Space Needle, visitors can learn about music history and instruments by way of well-designed, interactive exhibits.

The 'Northwest Passage' chronicles music in the Pacific Northwest from early jazz in the 30s to more recent artists Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Sleater-Kinney. Video interviews, concert footage and listening stations are available along the way.

The 'Jimi Hendrix Experience' has an interactive timeline, large monitors showing video, ipod listening stations (built into side tables at the edge of a couch) and a soundboard station where you can learn how to mix music (above). The station intuitively combines a touchscreen and hard buttons that make learning easy.

The 'Sound Lab' has a variety of real instruments kids and adults can play by way of audio and simple on-screen instruction and 'Spaced Out', a collection sci-fi album cover art also has a theremin you can play. Just wave your hands to control the volume and tones! The variety of interaction makes the museum a great user experience.

Comments

Setting a price alert on Stubhub

A few weeks ago, my wife and I really wanted to see Alvvays and Frankie Rose at Metro in Chicago. But the show sold out and I was left to look for tickets second-hand. I've used Stubhub before to purchase concert tickets but up until now, hadn't tried their Price Alert feature which lets you set a ticket price max and be notified when the price goes below it. The user experience from beginning to end was really good. The feature is easy to find and provides very mobile-friendly controls to create the alert. The Price Alert tab was prominent on the event details screen - very easy to find. Note: today (1/5/18), Stubhub has removed those tabs and you have to tap an Info button top right of the viewport to look for the same feature. It's a still a good UX once you get there but it's an additional step. The Price Alert feature is intuitive and uses tappable numbers to let me pick the quantity of tickets (not a clunky dropdown menu or less efficient plus/minus p

A site map for a music application

For the past several months, I've been working with the CHIRP Radio volunteer tech team to design a mobile solution that allows station DJs to plan out their weekly shows. At a high level, a DJ should be able to browse and select songs from a massive music library, and add them to one or more playlists, which can be used for their shows. The app also has functionality like the ability to read album reviews, view recent activity by DJs in the app, and review a DJ's profile. A site map is an important artifact when designing any application or website. It shows how the overall navigation should be structured, can be used with end users to validate the taxonomy, and is helpful for developers as a companion to wireframes or mockups. Below is a site map I recently created for the project. The highest level navigation options are lighter in color, while as the user navigates deeper, darker colors are used to represent those options. The coloring isn't necessarily a known

KEXP's new Apple TV experience

I love KEXP . It’s a listener-supported radio station in Seattle. It streams all around the world on its website and mobile app. And they’ve had a really good app for the Apple TV for some time - great to stream in the house at a high volume! And I’ve reviewed them before here . Oh, and also here . They recently released an excellent new version of the app for Apple TV. And although it doesn’t introduce a lot of new features, it’s way more visually engaging and maximizes the screen real estate much better than before. Here are some of the major changes... Additional, prominent functionality- Archive (stream any show from the past) and streaming Settings The old version had a lot of wasted, unused screen real estate while the new version makes more efficient use of the screen New, large, colorful tiles along the bottom represent each song played in chronological order You can scroll left and right to see history of songs played (much further back in history than before) Larger album

music UX