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Project Overview
TalkMusically is the new killer app which brings together smartphones, music and social media. TalkMusically allows you to call a friend and share in real time the vibrations of a new song, while simultaneously talking together – experiencing the warmth of togetherness while listening to your favourite music.
TalkMusically is unique. But it’s so much more than just another technological breakthrough and, like most essential things, words can’t do it justice. Experience TalkMusically for iPhone and allow its magical powers to carry you far away!
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Team
TalkMusically was founded to deliver on a unique vision to combine the worlds of music, smartphones and social media.
Compsoft have been specialising in mobile since 2009, having designed and developed web-based applications for many years prior. Compsoft combine stunning interface design with cutting edge development to deliver the best possible app for each customer. Our thirty-strong team lives and breathes mobile - we love nothing more than to apply our passion, creativity, skill and experience to each client’s individual requirement.
Project Brief
Music is the beautiful, exciting, inspiring and wonderful soundtrack to our lives - how much of the time we spend with friends and loved ones is set against the backdrop of our favourite songs? Our smartphones allow us to keep in touch over vast distances wherever we may be and yet, until now, it’s not been possible to enjoy on a call the same music we share when we’re together.
TalkMusically’s vision is to change this – bringing together smartphones, music and social media, and drawing us closer than ever to the people whose company we love. However when TalkMusically first approached Compsoft in early 2013, there were a number of technical challenges to overcome if this vision was to become a reality. How could music be reliably played on the same call as voice? Users wouldn’t want to have to upload all their music to the cloud, so how could the phone’s local music library be used as the source? And how would the user receive calls when the app is in the background?
Working together Compsoft and TalkMusically solved all these challenges to deliver a secure and reliable iPhone app which is a joy to use – delivering without compromise against TalkMusically’s vision.
Project Need
No other app enables friends to speak while playing music in the background. For the first time you can call a friend and play them your new favourite song, or a musician can play a track to a fellow band member and get real-time feedback. All this can be done simply and reliably anywhere you have a network connection. And because it’s VOIP, there are no call charges.
User Experience
The app was designed to make it as quick and easy as possible to allow a user to start talking musically. On installing the app you can register using your Facebook account, or alternatively create a new account. The app automatically checks your device contacts and/or Facebook friends to see which are already registered for TalkMusically, and adds them to your TM contacts. Any new friends starting to use the app will also appear in your contacts. Once linked it’s easy - simply choose the person you want to call and the track you want to play. A help screen explains to the user what to do, and all functions are easily accessed via an iOS pull-in menu.
A cool, modern design was created to appeal to a young, design conscious audience – as the app design process coincided with the announcement of iOS7, a cleaner, flatter approach was adopted while retaining colour to guide and prompt usage.
In order to identify the functionality, user experience (UX) and graphic design requirements for the app, Compsoft undertook a Workshop, Specification and Design phase with TalkMusically. During this phase the TM and Compsoft teams met to discuss requirements and brainstorm implementation ideas.
Further to the Workshop Compsoft created a “wireframe” user journey showing the screens of the app and key navigation concepts. Once the wireframes and been refined and agreed, Compsoft created alternative graphic designs, before amending TalkMusically’s preferred designs based on their feedback.
Project Marketing
The marketing strategy for TalkMusically uses digital media to prompt and encourage engagement with the brand across social media, backed up with more traditional awareness generation via blogging, targeted advertising and PR.
There are three overlapping goals in the strategy:
• To make potential TM users feel comfortable that the app is a substantial, new, exciting and, most importantly, safe way of communicating that is used by many others in their peer groups.
• To make new TMers feel welcomed into a community of like-minded individuals. At the time when they are both most excited and scared about their new activity, we want them comfortable to share far and wide with their own friends and family and to fully engage with TalkMusically across all social media platforms.
• To prompt the old hands (those using TM for more than a week or two) to re-use and continue engagement. This is done using in app alerts and more traditional email communications, backed up by social media activity providing reminders of the relevance of TalkMusically to their life.
TalkMusically will be advertised on Facebook and Twitter targeting users based on the following criteria:
• Age group 15-25
• Liked music pages and listen to music
• Sharing music
• Active in Social media
Project Privacy
The model for User Security was based on two principles:
1. Users should only be discoverable by people they actually know, i.e. Facebook friends or device contacts, and
2. Connecting with such friends should require as little user effort as possible
So the system automatically links you with any of your contacts who have the app, and enables you to invite any who don’t. If another user subsequently joins TalkMusically and you are their Facebook friend or in their device contacts, you will automatically be linked. Of course all users can decide whether to reject an incoming call, and if you’re linked to someone you’d rather not be, TalkMusically can easily unlink you on the server. In keeping with the ease and speed of use principles, once registered, there is no need to keep logging in to the app.
Music & Performance
This category relates to applications that are themed around music and performance.
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