Our strategy includes designing a washer and dryer that does not require the user’s action to proceed from washing to drying, design a product that saves time, energy and recycles water. Among our goals is stressing the importance of sustainability and convincing a manufacturer that this product is going to be marketable and fill a significant portion of demand. By clearly illustrating these characteristics our main goal would be to persuade a company representative that our product would be a successful commercial item that would be worth manufacturing.

For achieving that goal we must design a clever, simple and recognizable logo that conveys the ideas mentioned above: ease of use, economy, environmental sensitivity, and of course less time spent doing laundry. Our website layout should be simple, clean, easy and pleasurable to navigate. It will have to display in detail our product’s technical characteristics. We will use HTML, CSS, photography, animation, and copy to clearly illustrate the product’s advantages and specifications.

The user should be able to understand with clarity why our washing/drying machine is better than a simple washer/dryer combo and why it would be profitable to mass produce it.  A manufacturer representative should be able to navigate and see the different parts of the product, each subsystem separately and everything put together, using an intuitive and efficient interface.

March 4, 2013

App Review

Designing for New Media

Milt Chatzimouratidis

A quite popular and used by a wide variety of people app is Shazam. The word was introduced in the range of the 1930’s to 1960’s by a comic series character and means extraordinary deed or transformation. A clever choice if one thinks of how music in our days is inspired or influences popular culture. The logo is made with a circle that contains a stylized figure that strongly resembles an S. Shazam brought about a small revolution when it came out. It covered a significant demand among different types of music lovers and made remembering an artist name or song title less important. In a world where the first thing people think of taking with them is their smartphone, individual memory can be replaced by collective memory or artificial intelligence. Although Shazam will never be as popular as Google Search, for example, it has become a useful daily instrument.

The app has a fairly simple interface: the starting screen is made of a four-part navigation bar on top and an oversized logo that covers the rest of the screen.  Once the music is identified, the user is taken to a screen with the album art and various resources for sharing or buying music, reading the lyrics of the song, and retrieving information about the particular piece or artist. Simplicity is the keyword here: very few steps to reach the desired information make the app functional and usable.  Again, simplicity in aesthetics reveals that the design is focused on making the app functional and usable rather than giving it an original look. Back to the starting screen, accessing the list of songs that the user has tagged, his or her friends’ comments through social media, or the chart of most tagged songs – is that really needed? – is a matter of a single tap.

Shazam is an easy process for any user: start the app, tap anywhere on the logo. One must allow a few seconds until the data file is sent and matching process is complete then get the answer. That is the main process. Then a user may choose to share the music through social media, buy the music, look up information or videos about it, check out the lyrics or the artist’s discography, or read a review, among other things. Each one of these functions is accessed through a single tap; however, some of them take the user to external sites that require more effort than that.  Shazam’s guess rate is fairly high according to various articles it ranges from 60 to 85% which means it uses appropriately accurate recognition software and also a pretty big database.

Overall, Shazam has changed people’s lives, not in a spectacular way but it has definitely contributed in searching, finding, and buying music more easily, in a simple and accessible almost to everyone way.