Billy Ho


Billy Ho(he/him) is a Creative Technologist and Designer who works at the intersection of Art, Research, and Commercial Technology. His works aim to evoke Introspection and Empathy for both humans and machines.

Billy holds a BFA in Industrial Design from Shih Chien University and an MFA Design and technology from Parsons School of Design. Click here︎︎︎ to view Résumé.



Beam

2022 Spring
︎Finalist of: Adobe Creative Jam + Sonos
A collaboration with Nanwei Cai
[Adobe XD]

Overview

Beam is a music streaming platform targeting users from teenagers to adults. Centers around the in-person music sharing experience.

Beam helps users easily discover and share their love of music with each other, highlighting the time and space anchored with each shared music, with a dedicated feature to store the rich context and story.

Background

Stated in the prompt by Adobe + Sonos’ creative jam, our challenge was to design an accessible third-party mobile app where people can easily discover and share their love of music with others in the same space, in-person.

Challenge + Problem Statement

“ How might we harness the power of digital music platforms to improve the in-person music sharing experience? “

Music in Beam serves as tokens of memories, memories of a friend showing you off a band they just discovered, memories of your college graduation road trip, memories that made up the vignettes of acquaintances and trips, encapsulated within each music.

“ Music that takes you back, a trip down memory lane ”


Solution Highlights

Beam offers a new way to share music with your friends and families, catalog and store each music shared as a piece of memory, with the ability to revisit them whenever, wherever.

New users onboarding


Users onboarding provides a glimpse into the in-person sharing features. 

Music sharing


Beam features automatically curated personal highlight reels of short video/audio clips from each user's favorite artists.

Allowing them to share the highlights with their friends in just one touch, without any previous editing, the contents in the reels are determined by the number of times our user had streamed.

Highlight reel


Once shared, recipient will be able to quickly tap through sender’s personal favorite moments from the artists.

Moments playlist


Beams centeres around the “Moments” playlist, a archive of all the previous musics shared with the user.

The playlist puts significant emphasis on personal memories. Users will be able to filter the songs with different sharers.

Map display


Users can also interact with “Moments” using the map layout, creating another layer of immersion and personal memories. 

We decided to make each shared song a geo-tagged pin, populated within a built-in map, as a place to revisit those past memories.

Progress

Who are we designing for?

Target users are teenagers and adults who crave music consumption more than casual listening and seek further details about the artists and the music-making process.

Identify pain points

Our users possess deep knowledge of artists they are passionate for, and often hear more than one version of the same song from all the different sources and events. They usually prefer a specific version to others, so they would like to share that version with their friends.

Key user flow

Identify different potential intervention points to introduct the ability to share a pre-curated reels and a playlist dedicated to the shared items.

Prototype