Casino Music Player
Minimalist app streaming music from Dropbox. A personal and experimental project on Windows Phone, made by a team of two.
Programming: Andréas Saudemont
When
2012
Personal project
My role
Original idea
Requirements
Interaction design
Visual design
Learnings
Priority management
Onboarding experience
Grid-based visual design
Simplify, simplify, simplify...
Overview
Though we made Casino for fun, we followed a rigorous design approach. We set a simple proposition then optimized for essential functions:
Sync with Dropbox
Fluid library browsing
User-friendly playback
The design was respectful of the Windows Phone design guidelines (Metro) yet rather bold. Nice ideas included dragging the album artwork vertically to fast-forward or rewind, ambient animated backgrounds, and a well-crafted onboarding experience. We also supported an offline mode, and integrated play controls with the system media tray.
UX details
We looked for the best possible UX in every corner.
Track-list views honor song titles by displaying them fully across multiple lines. Collection views don’t show any labels for albums, so that artwork can shine. In the material world, after all, people identify albums by the sleeve alone. Only when the artwork is missing do we create a placeholder cover that shows the album title.
Onboarding: Scanning Dropbox for music feels whimsical, with artist names appearing like fish swimming into view. People can start using the app immediately and let the process finish in the background.
Distilling
The original playback UI used a triple panel panorama packed with features. After playing with it for a few days, Andréas challenged the idea and we agreed to simplify. Versions later we found that a single, pared-down panel was all we wanted. You know you’re on the right path when you begin to forget what you have removed…
