Details under the fold:
As a subscriber to Spotify, my interface shares lots of similarities. However, that’s okay because my process involved competitive analysis in addition to reviewing each feature. I didn’t want to fall into the trap of reinventing the wheel.
After listing all the features I would want to see in a music player, I looked up quite a few music players to see what other users would want to see.
- Amazon Prime Music, Deezer, iHeartRadio, Jango, Pandora, Slacker, Tidal
With all the various features and interactions listed, I clustered them and decided what to include in my music player.
- The background is a dark grey (instead of white) as I don’t want to the screen to light up the surroundings as music apps are used a lot at night.
- I chose the bracket arrows ( > ) instead of an X as I did not want to have it misinterpreted as exiting or closing out (ending the song).
- I decided to incorporate the play queue (not shown) in the playlist if active.
- I originally wanted to make all the album art of the same size, but some album covers are not perfect squares and this creates visual hierarchy, which is important as the main screen is essentially a dashboard.
- I chose a heart to indicate “like” which can be accessed through a “songs I liked” playlist as the ( + ) in Spotify is slightly ambiguous.
- For me, the song position and duration are important elements to include.
- Lyrics are my sore spot for Spotify, so I made sure to include them here. The full lyrics can be accessed in the lyric settings menu. Also, in regards to Spotify, their treatment of lyrics makes me mad. For the most popular songs they occasionally show lyrics but they’re arbitrarily swapped with background info that the user has no control over. It enrages me! In fact, I find it to be implemented it so poorly that I wish it wasn’t there at all. Hmph!
- Although volume can be set with external buttons on the device or system-wide interfaces, I would love to be able to control it on the application.
- I like the Equaliser option as it can vastly improve a song, especially when connected to a bluetooth or better speaker. But it’s usually a hassle to change it, so I put it only one or two taps away.
Now this is the music player I want to use! How about you? Did I miss anything?