The Beat Suite is a successful royalty-free music library, established in the late 90's. I've been working with them since I designed their first e-commerce store in 2001, which won several awards and was celebrated for its unique and efficient user experience. This is the third iteration of the site that I've designed, due to launch later this year, this time with a responsive interface to cater for an increasingly mobile-centric audience.
My Roles: Strategy + UX/IxD/UI Design
The Beat Suite is based on a deceptively complex infrastructure, with over 50 different templates hidden beneath the surface. Part of our new UX strategy was to reduce complexity, and make it easier and more efficient to support new devices and screen-sizes in the future. This meant boiling the UI down into a design system of discrete, reusable components that could be arranged in any number of combinations, rather than thinking of the site as a collection of pre-defined pages.
These components were detailed exhaustively in a wire-frame and key page-types were assembled quickly for early prototyping. Each component was wire-framed at four key break-points to cater for larger desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphone devices, before being tested with real-world local customers.
Wire-frame prototypes were produced in Axure, and tested extensively before moving into Photoshop for the visual design stage.
