Tape It

Tape It’s quest to develop the ultimate recording app was missing just one thing; social integration, something they needed help designing.

  • My role

    Lead designer

Background

Tape It was born from the passion of musicians and software enthusiasts with the quest to build the ideal recorder for both rehearsals, songwriting and interviews. The founders all came from a music background where they long had been searching for a better app to record their musical ideas, when they didn’t find what they were looking for they built it themselves instead.

As their user base kept on growing and input from their passionate customers came pouring in, they were in need of help with further adding functionality and design in form UI ideas and how to integrate social sharing. For that, Tape It came to Hyper Island for our renowned design skills.

Challenge

Researching the current recording landscape

The client had a clear set position on where their product should sit: just between the standard Apple Voice Memos and a full fledged DAW production software. 

The reasoning behind this was that the modern musician want to be able to record their ideas with just a click, but with more flexibility and with a higher sound quality than the standard recording apps.

With this in mind we went all-out and dug deep into the competitors and softwares to pick the cherries in terms of good functionality and design, and also to see what we could implement without adding to much complexity to the user experience.

Image of design for Tape It
Between these two complexities was the perfect fit for Tape It

Challenge

Balancing adding new features without adding complexity

New features in all its glory, but sometimes less is more. In our clients case we were focusing on giving their users a bit more functionality with how they could edit and work with their tracks.

Some functionality we added were ways of cropping recordings, adding reverbs, cleaning up noise, marking sections of a recording to make notes and zooming in for better accessibility,.

Image of design for Tape It
In landscape mode more functionality opens up for extended editability

Challenge

Implementing social sharing without turning to a social media

With the ever growing trend of negative impacts from social media, Tape It wanted no business in adding to that. What we came up with instead was a way to invite people you wanted to cooperate with or people you wanted feedback from in a more intimate and exclusive way.

We created Mixtapes, a form of shared session that only the creator and the invited people can access. In those Mixtapes, everyone can add new recordings and discuss between themselves.

In this way for instance, a band members from the same band can add their own small recording demos for them to perfect later on in the studio.

Image of design for Tape It
We found inspiration from an analog stack of tapes for our overview of Mixtapes

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Morgan Hassel
Morgan Hassel