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MixDown is a digital service for young adults to engage with radio in an innovative way. The service allows youth to express themselves by creating short audio mash-ups using radio clips, repurposing and mixing the content with personalized messages. Building on the popular youth form of micro-expressions, MixDown offers an entertaining way to create a personal voice while sharing quick updates from the news.
Research
In this project we were working with BBC, and tasked with the creation a new digital service for 18-24 year olds. Using the corporation’s diverse and extensive programming, BBC wanted to reach the youth in an innovative way.
Through our user research, we developed a persona: Verena, an energetic 17-year-old high school senior. Verena makes extensive use of digital services like YouTube and Pandora, but our focus was on her use of Vine, which she uses to make 6-second silly videos with her best friend. We became intrigued by the use of Vine, especially within the context of Snapchat, Twitter, and Tumblr. These applications enable micro-expressions: snippets of content that convey a narrative despite its very short-form nature. If Twitter is the text platform for micro-expression, Snapchat the image platform, and Vine the video platform; what, then, could the audio platform be like?
Concept
We created mixdown, a digital service, which allows youth to use radio clips to express themselves by creating small audio mash-ups. It’s delivered along two platforms - as a smartphone app, which fits right into the lifestyle of many youth, and as an interactive radio, allowing the radio corporation to re-envision how people might engage with the news.
Interaction Model
Through MixDown, users can leverage a wide archive of radio programs to create “micro-expressions”. Users can save radio programs, clip them, and then blend them together into a 10 second audio mashup. They can also create and add their own recordings to mashups. When playing a mashup, the original audio files are listed below the mashup, creating direct access to the original program.
Tailoring our services to the youth, we wanted to make the interaction whimsical and fun - to encourage creativity - while also making it quick and smooth - to align with the tendency to want summaries and snapshots of the news. We believe that MixDown aligns with the design needs for both the company and youth users, offering an entertaining way to create a personal voice, while sharing summaries and quick updates from the news.
