tuned
Year
2023
Service
Brand Identity and app UI/UX
Client
(-)
Question
How can a music streaming experience, typically designed for individual listening, become a shared activity that brings people together through their musical taste?
Goal
Design a streaming platform that encourages shared listening by allowing users to create and join live music stations, transforming music discovery into a social experience.
Process
The project originated from an academic brief that challenged students to rethink an existing type of application by introducing a feature capable of significantly changing its purpose. While analysing music streaming platforms, I noticed that these experiences remain largely individual. Although users can share songs or playlists, listening itself almost always happens in isolation.
Tuned reimagines streaming as a collective experience. Instead of listening alone, users can create or join live stations—shared spaces similar to personalised radio broadcasts. By creating a station, users curate the music in real time and can invite friends or other listeners to join the session, allowing everyone to experience the same sequence of songs simultaneously.
Joining an existing station turns music discovery into a shared experience, where users can explore new artists through the curation of people with similar tastes. Stations can also be followed, notifying listeners whenever they become active again. To further reinforce the social aspect of the platform, the app includes a private messaging system that encourages conversation and the exchange of music recommendations.
The visual identity draws inspiration from musical notation. Just as individual notes connect to form continuous melodies, the graphic system is built around simple shapes that link together, serving as a visual metaphor for people connecting through music. This principle informed both the logo and a mascot inspired by the form of musical notes, designed to accompany users throughout the interface.
The mascot appears in a series of 3D onboarding illustrations introducing the app's core features—Discover, Share and Connect—and also serves as the default avatar for new users in a simplified form.
To develop the application, I designed the interface system, created the wireframes, and built an interactive prototype in Figma. The mascot illustrations were modelled in Blender, allowing the visual identity to extend naturally into the product experience through expressive three-dimensional assets.
Takeaway
This was the most comprehensive UI/UX project I developed during my studies and gave me the opportunity to approach product design as an integrated system. Rather than solving a purely functional problem, I aimed to create a cohesive experience in which the central idea—using music to connect people—is reflected consistently across the branding, communication, and product features.
The project also encouraged me to expand my design toolkit. Instead of limiting the work to software I already knew, I explored Figma more deeply to develop an interactive prototype and learned Blender to create the application's 3D illustrations. It reinforced the importance of choosing—and learning—tools based on the needs of the project, rather than adapting the project to the tools already available.
