Heartkick

The same night the Apple Watch came out, I sat down with a developer and brainstormed possible ideas that could take advantage of this new technology. Heartkick was born that night. We combined our passions for innovation and design and created a first draft in under a week.

While the first development sprint was ongoing, I started to draft the first sketches of what the app could look like. Heartkick needed to be unique but at the same time feel very familiar to the users. I benchmarked the most popular apps to design the music player, such as Spotify, Soundcloud, and Deezer, but the player was only the easiest part of the app.

We needed to design an interface capable of showing the current heartbeat of the user and a way to shift it to discover music that could excite or relax the user. The UX needed to be simple but effective. For this reason, I decided to make the heartbeat screen very minimal to maximize the focus on the only significant feature of the screen. The page shows the user’s current heartbeat and a heart icon at the bottom. A small animation conveys that the heart can be dragged left and right. By doing so, the user can now edit the speed of the rhythm while the app algorithm analyzes the selection and updates the playing playlist.

The next thing to design was a tagging screen to let the users pick their favorite genres based on the three heartbeat speeds, Slow, Normal, and Fast. Since everybody experiences music in their own way, we designed a feature to define what genre resonates better in specific situations. Does Jazz relax you? Does Techno pump you? For some, yes, but not for everyone.

Last but not least, we planned to create an Apple Watch app to take full advantage of its heartbeat sensor and give easy access to the player controls.

Heartkick is not available anymore. It has been a lot of fun, though! :)