Tape it is an app for songwriting and audio recording that allows for fast and easy recording to organize and share your ideas.
The Brief
My Role
The Solution
The Process
The Brief
The brief for this project was to create a concept for reaction and interaction within the app, with real human behaviour at the core of the concept. The client was also clear on that they did not want a social network.
My Role
My role in this project was to lead the team as the project manager. I was responsable for setting a structure for our work, aligning the team, facilitating the process of assigning roles and responsabilities and have a day-to-day overview of the process with the team’s well-being as well as the final concept in mind.
I also took part in the design and research process.
The Solution
The concept that we created is based on the insights that we got from our user research. We designed three main features:
The comment feature
A read thread in our user research was the need to have conversations about recordings that are specific and not derailed. The comment feature allows for comments on parts of the recording and a thread can then be created under the comment to keep that conversation in one place.
The highlight feature
After many interesting discussions, both with users and in the design team, we reached the conclusion that we wanted to take a step away from the hearts and the likes we all know maybe a bit too well. Insted we decided to implement the highlight – that is doing just that: highlighting a section. It may be to remember specific parts of the recording, to show that you appreciate it, or that these sections are extra important. This is to keep a professional tone of voice and also a wink to the analogue world with pen, paper and highlighting markers.
The trimming feature
This allows for users to cut out material that is not needed, and also cut out specific sections that you want to share or save. To use this feature you need to be added as a collaborator – to give the creator control over who can edit the file.
Addinionally, as is mentioned above, the possibility to add collaborators was implemented. After interviewing users and the client – it was clear that the purpose of interacting in the app is to do it with people who have a clear connection to what you are doing: the members of your band, the musician you are collaborating with, or your collegue if you are a researcher using Tape it to record interviews.
The Process
The first days of the project were spent on team building and aligning on roles, expectations, goals etc. We used a tool called Team Canvas to do this, which is a great way of understanding each other in the team and finding common ground for how to work during the project. I find it especially important to come back to these discussions throughout the project to re-align and see if the team’s needs and expectations are still being met and so on. In this project one of the team members wanted to change some of his responsabilities mid-way since he felt more inspiration than he had anticipated to put a lot of time into the prototype, which in the end was a great way to go.
Our user research consisted of several semi-structured interviews and user testing of 45 min – 1 hour. The first part of the interview focused on how the users communicate with each other and give each other feedback when it comes to practicing together or sending recordings.
They were asked what platforms they use and how that feels, how they put down their thoughts and what their needs are in a digital environment. The second part of the interview focused on the app and its features.
From these insights we defined what the somewhat broad brief meant for us, and we boiled it down to our creative brief:
To create a way for users to interact with each other in a purposeful, humanistic way that is specific to feedback, logging and documentation. It’s about getting to the point through personal communication without wasting time.
We continued with brainstorming sessions to start working on our concept. This resulted in wireframes that were turned into prototypes that we tested and and iterated around. We continuously went back to the brief and our insights to make sure that the concept followed what we had set out to do.
The entire process can be summarized with the double diamond which is a model that we kept in mind throughout the project. The two diamonds represents a shifting process of exploring a problem in a wide and deep sense and then take focused action.
We started with the brief, and continued with user research – exploring and expanding our understanding of the problem. We then narrowed this down to clear insights and a re-definition of the problem. This was used as a foundation for the explorative part of brainstorming and creating wireframes. In the end this was narrowed down to the final hi-fi prototype which was presented to the client.
Credits to team
I worked in this project together with:
Eilidh Greig
Jonathan Kjell
Johan Priebe
Evelina Johansson