iHeartRadio for iPhone
Snapping up 42,000 new users a day, iHeartRadio has enjoyed exponential growth over the past 4 years — eventually hitting a total listener base of more than 60 million. Over that time, thousands of designs have been explored, and the iPhone app alone has gone through hundreds of changes. The end result: the simplest, most elegant music player on the market to date.
Starting from an app solely designed to play live radio stations and evolving it into a service that programmatically predicts what people want to hear has been no small feat. But by testing what users respond to, what they ask for and what they never even knew they wanted, my team and I have strategically simplified the UI and UX while providing exponentially more value to the consumer.
We dissected, studied and remade each element to create a new visual language, wholly unique to iHeartRadio. The station logo and album art became the main attraction, stretching from edge to edge, relenting our brand colors in favor of each individual artists'. All buttons and icons were meticulously crafted to echo the brand aesthetic: bold, slightly rounded and friendly. Functions that users needed less frequently were moved into an overflow menu, simplifying the experience for both new and returning users.
With a focus on user-friendliness, the browsing functionality was refined to help users quickly access station recommendations, favorites and playlists based on what they might be doing at a specific moment. And to help the many people new to the app — or new to smartphones in general — clearly understand the content of each station and its reason for being recommended, concise descriptors were added to enhance the browsing experience.
iHeartRadio has proudly maintained a 4.8-star app rating for the past several years, even with a user base that ranges from expert to novice. With such a diverse user base, our research and testing was crucial for identifying pain points, and allowing UI and UX to work out a solution. After serving up thousands of these solutions, we've been able to provide an app that not only innovates, but also helps introduce millions of new mobile users to the best the app world has to offer.