BEATS BY DRE X HTC

ROLE: SENIOR UX DESIGN LEAD

COMPANY: HTC CORPORATION

HTC Corporation is a Taiwanese consumer electronics company founded in 1997. HTC began as an original design manufacturer and original equipment manufacturer, designing and manufacturing laptop computers.

HTC and Beats by Dr. Dre, teamed up to offer audiophiles and HTC smartphone users a better audio experience. Listening to music via smartphones was not consumers’ preferred option during this time, but partnership allowed for a unique opportunity.

HTC acquired Beats in 2010 and continued their shared goal to elevate the smartphone music experience for discerning audiophiles. Importance was placed on pairing hardware with software to ensure premium sound quality with an easy-to-use digital music experience. Beats was later sold to Apple and the music application that HTC developed eventually replaced iTunes to become Apple Music as it’s known today.

PROJECT OVERVIEW

Elevate the smartphone music experience for discerning audiophiles, ensuring the integration between hardware and software to provide premium sound quality.

ROLE: SENIOR UX DESIGN LEAD

Transformed partner design specifications and business requirements into a strategy and design solutions.
Presented and advocated for design initiatives based on insights and market research.
Developed scenarios and storyboards to communicate design concepts to team members, product groups, and leadership.
Secured internal sign-off for the vision and execution plan.

PROJECT GOALS

Develop market-differentiating music service with features that enable users to side-load or download music content to their devices while managing DRM policies, offline listening, and curated content.

SOLUTIONS

The Beats by Dre x HTC music application solved complexities in digital music service and acquisition by removing licensing and rights-management barriers, promoting streaming audio, enabling advanced audio settings to maximize sound quality, and using specialized audio hardware and software processors. The music application and service provided various features curated for the Beats music community.

REQUIREMENTS

Build a platform-agnostic experience across device types
Localize the application interface and content for 5 countries
Enable features integrated with core phone software and hardware platform
Create a seamless experience that provided continuity with the HTC Sense, HTC’s Android augmented experience

SUCCESS MEASURE

Beats x HTC branded devices sold
Adoption rate of music service
Time spent on music app
Application adoption and usage

3

PLATFORMS AND OS SUPPORT

3

HARDWARE DEVICE SUPPORT INCLUDING DESKTOP, MOBILE, TABLET

5

GLOBAL REGION SUPPORTED

DESIGN OVERVIEW

The screens represent the design work and explorations I led to guide the product development and key decisions while also building design systems, prototypes, and component libraries.

Device and Platform Agnostic Design