by Sloan Zimmerman and Fiona Wood
Soundcloud provides a way for musicians to easily share tracks and for fans to hear the latest that their favorite artists are up to. The Soundcloud website has functionality for recording, sharing, searching, and browsing audio files. However, the Soundcloud Android app does not achieve all of Soundcloud’s goals–it’s difficult to find new music using the app, and the browsing that the app does have is difficult to navigate. Like Zipcar sought to contain the functionality of their service within a mobile app instead of requiring users to sign up using the website, we wanted to adapt the Soundcloud app so that a user can reap the full benefits of Soundcloud’s versatile music sharing services from the mobile app alone. We introduce two new features: “Who’s Hot,” featuring popular artists and recommendations based on a user’s history on the site, and an improvement on the messaging tool that allows a user to receive twitter updates and improve the connectedness of the users with one another.