Bounce

As designers have Figma, engineers have GitHub and AI workflows, I and my fellow musicians have been longing for a digital solution to this ancient collaboration problem:

Solution highlights

Insight #1 — Tedious Collaboration Process

Sending large files and stems of a single fix is tedious and time-consuming, especially when most of the time the receiver has to realign the new files with their local version manually.

Going back and forth like that, especially in different time zones, is so tedious. I think this is why people still prefer to collaborate in person in this digital age.

Insight #2 — Lack of support for musical discussion

Musicians often use onomatopoeia such as 'ooh' and 'tsk' to convey musical ideas to each other. There are no direct support for this form of communication digitally.

Ideating is a very vocal process, so having a way to call and make conversation in real time will boost collaboration.

Insight #3 — No true mastery of the tool

Sound engineering is a hard discipline on its own, but often times these engineers still need to adapt to DAWs custom plugins and troubleshooting system on the side. DAWs are hard to learn for both professionals and beginners, even if they already spend 10,000 hours on it.

After all these years, I still don't know what I'm doing.

Refined HMW questions

• How might I support direct file and version management in DAWs to help alleviate time cost for sound engineers and producers?
• How might I make remote music collaboration in DAWs feel as natural and expressive as being in the same room?
• How might I help musicians of all levels adapt to DAWs quickly?

Maximizing focus by abstracting workflows

In the quest of challenging the traditional DAW interface pattern to replace with a more intuitive one, I separated production apart from post-production. This created the challenge of connecting them together while keeping complex functionalities intact. The final 3 modes proved to be more intuitive for seeing this connection.

Before: 4 screens for 4 modes, too complex

After: 1 screen for 3 modes, simple

Communication channel

Placing communication in the top right corner instead of left proved to be more discoverable to users through testing. Additionally, improvements in labels ('Jam' to 'Teams') and visual nature of the components (fixed vs. floating) added to discovery and utility success rate.

Before: fixed comms bar and vague language

After: flexible position and intuitive language

Toolbar

From testing, I refined the information displayed in the toolbar for each mode: recording and mixing, so that only necessary functions remain. Final: essential information only — Recording, Group, ABC/Lyrics, Select (Recording Mode) | Recording, Plugins, Effects, Sync Current Version (Mixing Mode).

I take inspirations from the feeling of the 'zone' – how we can get lost in the process of making music. I gravitated towards the indie, ethereal vibe to remind users that Bounce is for bouncing human ideas. Additionally, I took the name 'Bounce' from the common DAW button label when exporting the final product, and the act of 'bouncing' ideas off of each other.

3 different views allowing focusing on different tasks with flexible panels

Real-time chat, call and video call while working on production

Recording and composing a new song

Quickly put down a musical idea with teammates to canvas with no time restrictions

Add effects and plugins as nodes for troubleshooting semantic audio issues (mixing post-production)

Upload local changes to the shared cloud for mutual access to the latest version (version control)

Results

“Would absolutely use this for my producing work, and excited to see what comes next for Bounce!” — a guitarist/producer after testing

“So exciting…this reminds me of a physical mixing board.” — a product designer and hobbyist producer