Born, raised, and currently residing in the GTA 🇨🇦, I’m a recent graduate of Sheridan College’s Honours Bachelor of Interaction Design (Class of 2020 🎓!).
I like to dabble in a bit of everything; illustration, motion graphics, 3D modelling, traditional painting, etc. No matter what it is, I’m always up for the challenge. 🎨🖌
But of course, my expertise lie in the UX design process and visual design ❤️. I pride myself in putting lots of care into my work, to me the big picture is just as important as the little details.
Thanks for stopping by!👋 If you like what you’ve seen and wanna talk you can find me here:
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* I’m also currently in search of job opportunities, click here to view my resume.
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This project was created for the 2018 TD Elevate Hackathon. In response to a citywide cultural shift into a more modern and smarter era, the City of Toronto/Universal Music Group were seeking ways to optimize the city life experience through the use of music. I was largely responsible for visual design of the app and together with my team we created the concept and user experience.
Duration: Weekend (Fall 2018)
Tools: Illustrator, XD, Aftereffects
Project Type: Team, UX Design, Visual Design
In a city that’s always on the move, people need to look for ways to destress and have some “me-time”. This can be hard to do for those who just don’t have the time or have the funds to do so.
There’s a special connection between music and our emotions, which is why they play particular music in films, and why they play particular music at the mall.
Because music has this innate ability to influence/emulate our emotions, we can take this connection and use it to enhance our day-to-day experiences.
As someone who’s always on the go, music is an easily accessible, time-efficient, and cost-effective way to relax and incorporate wellness into your life.
According to a 2017 article by Global News, Torontonians spend an average of 34 minutes just getting to work, so if people use that time to listen to music that's catered to their mood, this can help users start their day, and end their day off right.
Out of all music services widely used, Spotify has the largest and most comprehensive collection of music meta-data available; which does include mood/emotion. Spotify is also an ideal choice because it already has a user’s music preferences data available.
Taking Spotify’s music meta-data and user’s data, we can use this to auto-generate playlists for users depending on the mood they input.
Besides benefiting the citizens, we also needed to determine how our solution could benefit the City of Toronto and Universal Music Group. They were looking for solutions that could gather lots of data that could be used to look for ways they can improve the city and better cater to citizen’s needs.
To do this, we added a second function to our app that's location-based, providing users the ability to also find music based on their location, see/feel what others in the community are experiencing,
with the goal of providing a more culturally enriching experience when exploring different areas of the city.
Doing this, City of Toronto will be able to see the general emotion(s) citizens associated with certain areas and identify areas that need improvement. UMG benefits by being able to determine what kind of playlists are in demand.
There were two main functions we developed:
Playlist Generation & Explore/Location Mode
Making sure the process was quick and easy as well as gave users options to ensure the right fit, we decided to keep it at 4 main emotions at first and felt like these were good starters (sad, happy, calm, angry). The goal is to get the user to their desired mood by the end of the playlist
We chose to make the UI for this feature map-based to make the experience more visual/immersive, and to encourage more exploration of the area.
Going for a modern, dark aesthetic similar to Spotify’s, we wanted it to be reminiscent of a late-night city vibe. We also chose 4 main colours to be used throughout the UI to represent the 4 different emotions.
Alto is a music & self-care app that provides you the soundtrack to your life, allowing you to make the most of every moment.
Set your current mood and the mood you want to be by end of playlist, then simply choose a playlist.
See how others around you are feeling, and experience a community a whole new way through location playlists.
Alto will keep track of your mood and providing summaries of your overall mood within certain time periods.
Alto’s playlist interface will change colours to reflect the mood of your playlist to further aid in your mood shifting.
Though we didn’t place, that's fine, it was the first hackathon we all attended and we had a really good time. Best of all, I got to spend a whole weekend conceptualizing a cool app with some of my favourite people in Sheridan IXD. It’s also interesting to see 2 years later, that we were definitely on to something, as Spotify recently introduced a new user-curated playlist option called “Daily Wellness”,
that’s goal is to guide users through the day through a mix of music and motivational podcasts. It’ll be interesting to see how successful the feature will be or how Spotify might expand further into wellness in the future.
