Michael Novak

Written by co-founder Guenther Beyer. Absolutely a great piece!

gigbeat:

I love live music. No matter if a small familiar club or a sunny festival - the louder the better. So when Michael Novak asked me to help him create an Android app for gigs a couple of months ago, I was all in from the start. He wanted to participate in the New York Music Hackday, and wanted me to help him out with a couple of simple layouts, icons and assets.

This sounded quite easy and straight forward. But as soon as I sat down to work out a basic concept, I realized that the combination of music and locations is much more complicated than expected. Everything here is a matter of personal taste. Everybody loves different artist and genres, and everybody likes different locations and venues. How far will you travel to see your favorite band and will get out of your house for a third class artist, even if he’s playing right next to you? We played around with various approaches and settled on an initial 3 tab solution. Finding great gigs is half of the joy of it, right?

I sketched out some of the important screens and fleshed out the main-screen, to supply Mike with a set of basic assets. This should have been enough to get something nice done during that weekend. Music Hackday arrived and Mike worked out a lot of the back-end logic and some screens. But something just did not feel right. Somehow the app seemed out of place in the Android environment. So we went back to the drawing board.

We decided to create GigBeat as an Android reference app, going with common UI metaphors like the dashboard with big icons and the titlebar. Being tied to Songkick very closely in the early days, going with dark gray and pink came quite natural.  While the logic from the first build stayed in place for the most part, we reworked most screens a couple of times. Mike pushed me very hard to stay as close to most of Google’s own apps as possible, without sacrificing GigBeat’s own integrity. At times I really hated him for this, but it turned out to be the right path, eventually. Here are some examples of design choices:

- The first set of dashboard icons were nice, but a little too generic, and they had a bad balance between them. The weight did not feel right. So we reworked all of them with a bolder shape and a distinct inlay. Have a look at the attached iterations and sketches.

- Scanning your music library is nothing unique on Android. In fact a couple of apps did this earlier with a very beautiful execution. Most are displaying very pretty graphics with nice animations while the scanning is happening. That’s what we wanted to do as well in the beginning. But after some further brainstorms, these kind of handling just wasn’t the right way to go on Android. Google’ approach is much more about simplicity and clear information than it is about beauty and detail. So we came up with a simple progress bar, showing some really valuable information to the user, while the app is scanning content, like number of files, found artists and time remaining. That should be the information that really matters to a user, shouldn’t it? Waiting is always boring, no matter how beautiful the process is. Just tell me how long it takes so I can do something else …

- The launcher icon went through a couple of iterations as well. The first one had the shape of two tickets with a note inside a circle. But we felt this one was too close to rdio.com’s logo, so that version got trashed. Finally we decided that we wanted to emphasize the name of the app much stronger, so we simplified the icon to a single ticket with the initials GB - which are by coincidence my personal initials.

While moving on further and further with the app’s development, we got more and more ideas. Slowly the app became more than just a simple Songkick client and Mike added Last.fm support, sharing options and recommendations. At a certain point we felt that we even had to cut out features, or we would never get to a version that we could release without feeling totally unfinished.

GigBeat 1.0 was released on the Android Market on September 13th. Two weeks later we had over 2.000 downloads, 95% Five-Star ratings and a couple of very positive reviews throughout the web. Now we’re at 1.1 with over 500.000 downloads and a huge feature update, including Foursquare and Rdio support. So, what’s next? There are truly some very excited times ahead of us all, if you’re into Android and live-music. We will keep you up to date, so check in here from time to time.

Let us know what you think about GigBeat and what you would like to see in future updates.

Thank you for reading.