Kristina Kanter

Product Designer & UX Developer

Amplify

Year: 2018

Skills: UX Development, UI Design, Front-end Development

Place: Audio Network

Amplify is an internal music management tool at the core of the business allowing Audio Network music team to add and maintain data for every track, mix and album in the company's vast music catalogue.

Amplify app ux design

Problem

The aim of this project was to replace the legacy music database solution which heavily relied on manual tasks, custom scripts, communication between certain people and sometimes magic. It was a burden to support, a pain to use and a major bottleneck in the process of fortnightly music releasing, often resulting in delays and errors.

Amplify legacy software Amplify sketches

Workflow

The challenge of this project was in finding a balance between replacing the existing functionality and introducing an improved flow without interrupting users doing their daily jobs. A lot of processes were complex and slow, but software was still operational and it was working like this for many years, so complexity of this project wasn't only in replacing old software with a new Angular application with a shiny UI, but in understanding behaviour of users and leading them to organic UI and UX changes.

Amplify from prototype to app

Scenarios included adding new music to the catalogue on a daily basis, maintaining existing 160,000+ tracks and over 3,000 albums, and sometimes suspending tracks that were out of use. Every track and album has their sets of metadata which contains information describing the track, connecting it with the rest of the catalogue, and, in the end, allowing customers of Audio Network search for music across multiple products around the world.

Amplify statuses process Amplify statuses sketch

I have spend significant amount of time prototyping and testing ideas with the users, getting constant feedback and understanding what the needs and capabilities are. Starting from whiteboard sessions and up to high-fidelity prototypes, every piece of work went through several iterations, collaborations with different teams in the business and extensive research and testing with real users.

Amplify was launched in August 2018 and within next 6 months completely and successfully replaced the legacy system. It has significantly improved the speed, accuracy and transparency of music release process.

Amplify navigating tabs animation Amplify reordering tracks animation
Amplify app