jubo
Whatcha listenin' to?
Jubo aims to make music listening, sharing, and discovery more intentional. By creating a platform that provides more person-to-person sharing and recommendations alongside a physical display, this project aims to facilitate a more deliberate and social approach to music for the younger generations who have the most diverse and easy access to music than any other generation.
DURATION
FALL 2020
(Rev.) FALL 2023
ROLE
Solo Designer
SKILLS
Figma
Fusion 360
Branding
Timeline
Only the original product design and form of this project were created Fall 2020 while form revisions, user research, branding, and interface details were further refined in Fall 2023 during my Senior Capstone Studio.
01.
Speaker
This was the Glatt speaker: compatible with any smartphone and designed as a bauhaus-inspired addition to anyone's home.
02.
A New Vision
Building off of the original product design project, I wanted to explore a more digital approach to the social role of music in peoples' lives. How do people currently express themselves through music or other auditory media? Can connection through music be more easily facilitated?
Considerations
How do we . . . differentiate from current music listening apps?
make a cohesive, easy-to-understand interface?
get to the heart of sharing music for people?
The Core Problem
After conducting surveys and interviews with people across campus, I was confronted with a much more philosophical conversation surrounding music than I had initially intended. What are the core human needs of music? Why do we want to share music and what does that mean on an emotional level?
At the end of the day, the core intent of music is an avenue to connect people with. It's a way to bring people together, but to many people I talked to, it seemed like sharing or discovering music didn't feel as easy as it could be. Person-to-person sharing was hidden behind multiple clicks in existing apps like Spotify and discovering new music was almost exclusively done through algorithms or playlists prepared by those apps.
The Jukebox and Personas
So how exactly did people share music before the advent of Spotify or Apple Music? Mixtapes, records, vinyls, concerts -- all of these still felt like an "if you know, you know" approach to music. I landed on the jukebox: insert a coin, and you can play any song you want to a bar full of strangers or friends, sharing music this way. Could we emulate this using technology we have at our disposal today?
With this idea floating around and the research I had conducted, I created personas for who an application like this might be targeted at.
This is
A display for sharing
A music streaming platform
&
A closer look
Here's at a closer look at some of the screens from the streaming platform. There is direct message functionality within the app, alongside playlists curated through songs recommended by friends, as well as a "Song of the Day" feature that you can update daily to recommend to your friends!
Let's get physical!
This is the physical display to go alongside that app. In-app, you can press the jukebox icon and pair with any Jubo device in an active session. From your phone, you can add songs to the queue and the owner of the display can toggle whether or not the guest users can alter (ie. skip, pause, rearrange) the queue.
Here's how the queue might look on a guest user's phone, alongside a back view of the physical display!
This is meant to fit into a user's existing home audio system for people who have speakers and/or home assistants already, which can be connected through aux or bluetooth.
