009: Shared Playlists
I'm doing a Daily UI Design Challenge: designing a different screen each weekday for 100 days based on the prompt I receive in my email. Knowing very little about what sorts of prompts I'd receive, I decided to try my best to make all of my screens fit within a fictional travel-planning app, Let's Travel.I'm also writing about some of my UX considerations along the way.
Following fast on the heels of the previous day's challenge, day nine's prompt was also one that didn't fit too neatly as a feature within my Let's Travel app: design a music player. At first, I thought I would just do what I did for the 404 page – design a mobile music player that used the Let's Travel colors and styling, but didn't really make sense within the confines of the app. However, after thinking a bit more about it, I decided that maybe I could make a music player work within my app after all, by turning it into a shared playlist feature. The idea is that users can connect a streaming music account, then either copy over existing playlists or create new ones, and finally, share with their friends.
Here's the playlist list page:
Users can create a new playlist or tap on an existing playlist to modify, share, or play:
I didn't think through all of the various user flows for this feature. Some key ones that would need to be detailed are:
How do users add songs to the playlist? Do they just search for them, or should we support a browse experience as well?
How do users invite friends to share a playlist? Are there different permission layers; e.g., read-only vs. edit?
How do users connect their streaming music account? Can we keep them inside Let's Travel for the whole process, or will we need to take them to an external page?
If Let's Travel were a real project, this feature would probably rank pretty low on a list of priorities. Nevertheless, it could be fun for users to create a playlist for an upcoming trip, and then allow their travel companions to add songs to it.
