DRIFT RECORDS.

For an Experience and Interaction Design Class, I was tasked to design a responsive web and mobile app. It was a semester-long project which involved thinking of a business idea, creating personas, conducting interviews/gathering research, and ultimately designing 2-3 web and mobile workflows.

After exploring several ideas, I settled on designing UI systems for a record store.

Why Record Stores? (aka. The Problem)

My dad has a massive record collection and I grew up understanding its value. It was more than just better sound quality: it was a listening experience. Personally, I found the best part of buying a record was being able to physically find it. Something about holding that artwork and knowing it would immediately come home with me made it so much cooler. I wanted to translate the physical experience of “searching” to digital platforms. I dissected the why into two parts:

2. The space

Listening to records offers an experience that is greater than just better sound quality. The right record can enhance your environment and with us spending more time at home during the pandemic, it’s essential to cultivate a space of comfort.

1. The search

The pandemic changed the way we approach record stores (i.e. for hygiene purposes people avoided physically searching for records and would resort to online shopping instead). This affects indepedent stores that want to promote a community through the record sifting experience.

PERSONAS

I interviewed a range of participants, those who were somewhat interested in records and those who were enthusiasts. I found that people who were somewhat interested were hesitant to further look into record buying as a hobby because it was expensive and they were sometimes confused as to go about finding records/ record players. At this point in my process, simplifying the listening experience had become one of my goals along with digitizing the physical searching experience.

Based on the interview findings, here are 3 user personas I had constructed.