An engagement where I was responsible for giving body to the wonderful
music technology being developed by the good folks at beatoven. The
objective was to make a pilot web-app that could be tested with early
target audiences to validate product market fit. More importantly, this early version was intended for investor pitches to secure additional funding..
VISION
One-click
musical story
The vision for Beatoven was quite at the edge of music technology, a
tool that could generate music for content creators with no background
in music - where the AI can read the underlying emotional and
cultural context of the piece of content - a baby crying, expressions
on faces, cultural settings & create a satisfactory and appropriate musical story to supplement
it.
KICK-OFF
Journey Map with Stakeholders
At the time of kickoff, Mansoor and Siddharth had spent countless months
studying the market and understanding the opportunities and painpoints
of music creation for content creators. This first UX iteration intended
to build a test ready version banking on their gathered research and
feature roadmap vision. These were the key understandings that we
started our kick-off with.
KICKOFF
Deriving MVP Features
As an outcome of the kick-off, we were able to narrow down and
priotritize on a rough idea of product features that are feasible for
the pilot version.
WIREFRAMES
Lo-Fi Iterations
A peak into early wireframes to get a quick flow together of the storyboard we
discussed and quickly iterate on them. Multiple walkthroughs with
stakeholders and dev filled gaps in my understanding giving me a peep
into the technical processes behind the music generation.
VISUAL DESIGN
Expressing Musical Emotions
The emotional/mood representation for musical sections were a key
element that stood for the essence of the product - I tried to tap into the vague inexplainable quality that connects the visual arts to music.
VISUAL DESIGN
Visual & Interaction Design
The visual design combined with the final flows we decided on were finally bringing the whole end to end together.
We also tested these with users at various stages of finish to get some early feedback on any major blind spots around the features,
information architecture and corrected them early on.
VISUAL DESIGN
Flexible Design System
I set a base visual language based on the vision for the product, that
could feed into the branding process which could in turn feed back into
the visual system. Branding and logo design was being outsourced to other teams,
so the system was set flexibly to accomodate changes to color &
typography.
EXPERIENCE DESIGN
Pricing and Premium Nudges
Once the team had decided what their freemium model was going to be like, I incorporated nudges into the design.
Some features were locked away in different tiers of subscription. We chose to keep the features unhidden (but indicate that they are locked) and nudge them to the premium tiers.
EXPERIENCE DESIGN
Onboarding Tooltips
Given that we are introducing a dashboard with quite unfamiliar features, we were adamant about including hover tooltips for icons & progressive visual tooltips along with conversational UX writing to
help users make sense of the UI.
🚀 LAUNCH LEARNINGS
Challenges & Way Forward
1 Generation time: The tech stack required considerable processing time to generate music after edits in the final MVP build - this was not well-tolerated by the users. Much effort will go into reducing this generation time and communicating the process well to the users.
2 Dynamic Mood Selection: Mood selection was well recieved, but the mental model of the user involved waveforms that moved when music played. That dynamic character of a waveform communicated movement to the user, the lack of which left some delight to be missed.
3 Revisions & Choice: Early UT prototypes were far removed from the final build version of the mvp because of the audio component that was difficult for users to imagine. The final build with audio revealed more needs that when addressed could turn this MVP into an MLP (Minimum Lovable Product). Some examples - the need for users to save multiple revisions as they play around with the track before selecting a final one, the need for users to refresh generated options for each section, etc
4 The Workflow: Some users suggested that in their current workflow they like to edit the videos in tandem with the audio tracks following the rythm of the selected audio - accomodating the needs of a workflow like this and more others uncovered will need a deeper look.
SUPPORT
Design Operations Support
Early on, I helped the team understand how to divide design needs into modules that feed into each other and structure timelines. I consulted on calls with the outsourced
branding team to help them with a
direction. As my engagement came to a close, I helped the team hire a designer and
gave them insight into my process of evaluation and what skills I felt would make the best fit for Beatoven.
“A line is a dot that went for a walk.”
PAUL KLEE
COLLABORATORS
I'm grateful to have had the opportunity to contribute to this product right in its nascent
days. I'm proud to have collaborated deeply with the small wonderful team at
beatoven who provided the right kind of stakeholder support and filled in all my
curiosities to help me do my best job.