music UX

Metacritic is an app that aggregates critics' reviews for movies, games, TV, and music all across the web. It's a very useful site that I use occasionally to check out reviews for recent albums - and I'll link out to the reviewers' sites to read more detailed reviews.
Most of the site is organized fairly well. Search results are laid out in nice, usable columns based on category. And once I find a specific album, I can read each of the reviews very easily. 
There are just a few issues when search for an album. Although I can eventually find what I'm looking for, the experience is less than optimal - some elements really don't afford clicking or they change position in the UI, and the overall look and feel is inconsistent depending on where you are in the flow.
Here's a few of the steps when searching for an album...


The search input looks like a text field - but it's just a big button (I expected to enter search criteria here).

Tapping the search input …

A couple of weeks ago, I wanted to buy an inexpensive stand for my acoustic guitar. I was already familiar with Reverb, which is an online marketplace to buy and sell music gear. Without knowing much at all about guitar stands, I did a search, landed on their site, and within several minutes I was able to research and purchase a new stand. From the helpful information about different stands to the last step of the checkout process, the user experience was great. 

After Googling 'guitar stand Reverb', one of the first results was a super helpful article on Reverb titled, 'The 6 Best Guitar Stands for Every Budget'. It listed all with all of the comparative specs I needed right on the page (saved me from having to look at each stand's page). Knowing my budget was small, I selected the On-Stage XCG4 Classic Guitar Stand. The price was right, the design was simple, and reviews were good. There's only one I caught that could be improved - when I curiously tried a sim…

Before attending the An Event Apart 2017 conference in Chicago last month, I didn't know much at all about SVGs, or even what an arpeggiator was. One of the speakers, Chris Coyier, gave a fascinating talk about the possibilities of the vector image format. And some of the examples he used included things like logo animation, shape morphing, spinners, art.

He even had a music example - an arpeggiator created on CodePen by Jake Albaugh.

If you're interested, there's a great article about arpeggiators here. In short, an arpeggiator is commonly found on a synthesizer, and 'provides synth players with an easy way of playing complex synth parts via simple chords'.

Besides being built entirely with SVG, Albaugh's arpeggiator (which you can interact with) has a good user experience too.
Areas of the screen are clearly labeled and the bright yellow color stands out for selected items, The screen is laid out well - you select options in each section and finally simulate …

In any UI, calls to action must be clear - represented either by intuitively labeled buttons, or instantly recognizable icons. When they're not, your users will have to do extra work to figure out how a feature works, how to get started, how to distinguish areas of the screen. This will cause them to hesitate, be confused, and simply take more time than needed to get something done. And they'll most likely forget next time they visit your app.

In the case of Ultimate Guitar, an excellent guitar community website which includes chords (and tabs) from 1000s of songs, the detailed view of a songs's chords have too many similar calls to action.



In the image above, notice the number of tappable elements that represent 'Play'. The first and second one (top of screen) seem to do the same thing - they briefly open a different, more robust view of the tabs, followed quickly by a modal asking me to upgrade. Not only are the options redundant but only the second one has a lab…

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 best p…