Music Pix

MY ROLE

I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to create Music Pix from the ground up.

Since I was building the app from zero, I brainstormed and developed the concept, established a unique brand and style, and figured out the flow and user interactions. When I began UI design, the project was split between iOS and Android. I focused on Android product design. During production, I worked with the Android development team to finally ship the product.

Tango already had users who were spending a lot of time messaging each other pictures and music. Looking at our data, we realized that content (images, music, videos, GIFs, etc) was a big part of engagement for our users.

Since we already had a Spotify partnership, we were curious if we could utilize it in a more interesting way. We saw third party apps like Flipagram & Magisto launch and gain traction. Since we wanted to encourage users to stay within our ecosystem, the idea of Music Pix was born.

To Tango or not to Tango

In the beginning, we had a lot of discussions about keeping Music Pix within the core application. However, when Tango expanded from calling into the social sphere, the app started to become fairly bloated as a product.

We decided to create Music Pix as an MVP separate from Tango. A simplified mini application could help us test the MVP fairly quickly. If the mini application didn’t take off or didn’t complement our core messaging/calling application, we could easily discontinue or change the product. Keeping them separate meant our more creative initiatives wouldn't be slowed down to fit within our core app.

We also discussed whether we wanted to have a feed of other people’s videos as well. Again, we thought this was out of scope for our MVP (adding a social element complicated the app and might directly contradict Tango’s core application). We decided that the only thing we currently needed was a feed of a user’s own Music Pix.

We decided to do a preference test with the colours and the majority liked the dark theme.

Between early explorations and final designs, we decided to remove filters and themes altogether. Around that time, we thought we were adding a little too much to our MVP and we wanted to simplify and ship the product out to the users faster. Filters and editing features did go out in later versions of Music Pix.

Why Split Android & iOS?

Before the final designs, Elena and I had worked together for much of the project. I even explored some UI work on iOS. However, once we had a good direction, the two of us worked simultaneously on the two different platforms.

Usually we shipped a small sub-section of Android first because Google had a faster review time and because we had more users on Android. We studied our analytics and used what we learned there to refine iOS and polish Android for a full release.

For Music Pix, we decided we wanted to ship the two products together. Since this was a new launch, not having one platform meant a portion of our users couldn’t download it. It was fine for our main app to be asynchronous, but we felt like we needed both here since the creations are shared. Having both of us working on our own platforms allowed us to ship something faster and to keep the essence of their respective platforms.

Press

Music Pix gained a great deal of media coverage when we first launched. In fact, it was accidentally leaked one month early on TechCrunch.

Here are a few selected media hits we got for Music Pix.

Conclusion & Takeaways

MVPs are tough. Making this app requires finding a balance between deciding what was out of scope and what was required to make an app successful.

Music Pix never really took off, but we learned that quickly. I learned so much working on this project and creating an MVP from scratch. We worked on Music Pix as a skeleton crew at Tango and pushed out an entire app within a couple months. The app really influenced my view of how to create a project and deciding priority while pushing out product.

Before Music Pix, I think I was a little too much a perfectionist. I learned to remember to look at a project with more of a lean ux eye, as a product manager would. Is this needed? Could we release this faster without it? I used a lot of what I learned here to later co-found my own company. This project also influenced how I manage the design team and creative direction at Gfycat.