Chimes: Music Discovery Website Concept

The Challenge

A coworker and I were approached with the request to create concepts for a "wikipedia for music." One of the big hurdles we faced for this, though, was creating a solution that could have value, especially in light of competing streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music, as well as websites like AllMusic. We knew we could create something beautiful, but would it be useful?

Brainstorm Process

The question I kept going back to was "how can we make browsing for music on the internet feel like looking through records at the store?" When your purpose isn't necessarily to purchase anything, but simply to discover and see what's out there?

We decided to focus on the "search" concept, creating ideas that let you look at a library of different icons and words.

We decided the words were easier to scan, so we cleaned up the idea:

Then created wireframes to structure the content on the pages:

Until we were finally able to put together our proof of concept.

View Invision prototype here.

The front page embodied a starry aesthetic, showing different tag words, with an animation that let different words glow at random. Clicking on a word would start filtering the search results.

Artist Page

Of course we had to use our data viz skills as well, so we created an interesting timeline for the Artist Page.*Kudos to my co-worker Gen for coming up with this awesome idea.

Album Page

We also added a bit of flair to the track list, visualizing songs by mood. Hovering on a mood will highlight which songs fall in that category. Another idea that could've been interesting to explore was tagging the lyrics themselves with moods and sentiments.