Redesigning how musicians interact with and collaborate on shared audioClientTape ItIndustryMusic & Audio TechnologyRange of WorkUX Research, UX Strategy, Interaction Design, PrototypingCollaborating over audio has a middle-ground problem. The tools for building music - DAWs, recording software - are powerful but closed off; feedback and discussion happen outside them. The platforms for sharing finished work are built for audiences, not collaborators. And messaging apps, while convenient for sending voice notes, put the conversation front and centre and the audio in the background. For early-stage ideas you'd want quick feedback on - the rough hum during a commute or the tune you just thought of in the middle of the night - there's no natural home where the audio and the conversation around it can exist together. Challenge Tape It was already building that home - and approached Hyper Island to explore what that could look like. An audio recording app built for musicians and collaborators, a more considered alternative to the stock voice memo recorder, with stereo recording, smart waveforms, and file organization. The foundational layer existed: record, organize, share. But the sharing bit still felt clunky. And without a sharing mechanism that felt intuitive, Tape It remained just another voice memo app. That was the brief they brought to Hyper Island - once someone receives a mixtape or a recording, how do they react to it? How do they respond? What does intuitive feedback and interaction over shared audio actually look like?
The constraint was deliberate - this was not to become a social network. The interactions had to be rooted in real human behaviour.Scope & Focus The brief covered the full sharing experience - mixtapes and the recordings inside them. Interaction exists at every level of that hierarchy: browsing a collection of mixtapes, navigating a mixtape, listening to a recording. But rather than spread across the entire flow, we aligned with the client on a more deliberate approach: start at the lowest level. The recording screen is the atomic unit - the deepest layer, where there's nowhere left to go. Get the interaction DNA right there, and the logic scales up naturally to the mixtape screen, the collection view, and beyond.Approach We opened with a heuristic analysis of the existing recording screen - mapping where the interface was working against users rather than with them, and identifying the structural problems worth solving before anything new was designed. From there we moved into user research:
10 qualitative interviews gave us a grounded understanding of how musicians and collaborators actually work together IRL and give feedback - the instincts, the frustrations, and the moments where the tools got in the way.
A survey of 17 respondents helped us pressure-test those findings at scale.
6 usability tests on the existing app revealed where the experience was losing people.
"It's not just the music, but everything that happens around it too. When I’m at a jam session, it’s the entire evening that feels dope." When we spoke to people, two components kept coming up as what made jamming or in-person collaboration feel good. The first was the direct layer - people reacting to the sounds as they played. Finding moments interesting, responding to a solo, catching that one sound that made everyone look up. The second was everything around it - the indirect layer. The discussions after, the debates about what to keep or cut, the jokes, the tangents, the shared energy of being in a room together. Both were part of the experience. Neither felt replaceable.
That became the design direction: a direct interaction layer for reacting to the audio itself, and an indirect one for the conversation that forms around it. The digital equivalent of a jam session.
Outcome Hygiene reskinning along with newly concepted seven interaction patterns on one screen resolved the structural problems in the existing interface while introducing a new interaction model - moment tagging, section marking, voice notes, snippet sharing, and a unified discussion space - all built around one constraint: the audio never stops unless the listener decides it does. The result was a fully prototyped recording view, ready for testing with real users."