Zildjian
Mobile App
Zildjian, a 400 year old cymbal company wants to do something they've never done before.
Headphones for drummers.
Zildjian is intending to break new ground with headphones specifically designed for musicians and music-obsessives.
Our job was to create the companion app that interfaced between the user and the headphones.
The point of difference for the Zildjian headphones come from a sophisticated algorithm - the secret sauce - that would personalise the headphones to the individual's hearing profile.
Visually defining
Zildjian, a brand older than Coke-a-cola, need a digital brand that bridged the gap between the old and the new.
I'm not a branding expert, nor will ever claim to be. But this was a case where we needed to create our own rules of engagement when it came to how the UI would work.
We also knew that fans would be critical and, frankly, brutal if we looked to go too far away from the soul of the 400 year old brand.
Researching the beat.
We got the experience in talking with a series of professional to semi-professional to the beginner drummers.
Our focus was on the sort of additional features drummers were looking for. ANC, EQs and Bluetooth handling were expected.
But we had to explore what else made the users sit up and pay attention.
Designing in 4/4
One thing you learn about working with hardware is that limitations on what's possible are determined by data, speed, performance and battery.
We had to dig in and understand the limitations of battery - what we could reliably read. For example, getting an accurate idea of time left is hard. So we had to keep it broad.
Sound and toggle stats had to be worked out between the state of the headphones and what the user was seeing and interacting with on the device.
The key was to get good at asking 'what if', as hardware is aware of what's possible, they're not always clear with to what extent how data can be interpreted and then displayed.
Hand it over.
The development team were situated remotely, which created some additional challenges.
We spent some time communicating to the developers team what we wanted. During this process, we found that instructions and layouts in our Figma wasn't enough. That very clear guidelines on flow was cruical.
As designers, it can be hard to convey what you intend the software to do. Still, we invoked our own light version of a UML to bridge the gap and make understanding that little bit easier.
