Case Study
BitTorrent Now is an audio/video streaming platform which utilizes peer-to-peer technology as a platform for independent musicians and filmmakers to share their work. It started as a webapp that allowed users to purchase "bundles" of content, but the focus of the product has now shifted and evolved towards content discovery and streaming. We partnered with BitTorrent to build the iOS, Android, and Apple TV apps.
Information Architecture
We worked closely with the BitTorrent team to come up with the high level structure and flow of the app.
iOS App
We started with the iOS app, but knowing that we'd be making the Android app as well, we wanted to make sure that we were relatively platform agnostic in our design patterns.
Problem 1: Discoverability
One of the main goals that the client wanted to achieve was this idea of discoverability and constantly having content readily available to the user. To accomplish this, I separated the home feed into three sections. We found that users would only scroll a couple times before looking for another way to discover content, so I wanted to give them other avenues for discovery.
I also utilized tags to help the user discover content. In the search, tags are used to show what content is popular on the platform. I wanted to push users to discover new content through tags instead of resorting to traditional search.
Problem 2: Bundles
Bundles are a legacy feature from the website which consists of a collection of files. The problem around bundles is that, all information and metadata associated with music and videos are stored at the bundle level and not at the file level. This means that in the home feed or search, we are only able to serve up bundles and not individual songs or videos.
To work around this restriction, I autoplayed files within a bundle to give the sense that a user has selected a file directly. Additionally, users can favorite individual files, which creates a "bundle" for their personal favorites
Problem 3: Music and Video
Competitors such as Spotify, Youtube, or Vevo focus on one type of content and they optimize their designs for that use case. But for BitTorrent Now, we had to accommodate for both music and video.
I used iconography to help identify between music and videos in the bundle list. Additionally, tags come in handy for giving hints to the user about what type of content they will be consuming.
Android App
While we included some design paradigms that Android users were accustomed to, we wanted to keep as much parity as possible between the two platforms to create a better sense of continuity and consistency between the two products. We also didn't want drastic differences between the two to take away from the design language we've created for the BitTorrent brand.
Apple TV App
Due to how new Apple TV is, there aren't a lot of high quality apps in the Apple TV app store. We saw this as an exciting opportunity to design for a new platform and be a part of the first wave of apps for the Apple TV.
Icons
We created a fun set of icons that would give a voice to the BitTorrent brand.
