THX Spatial Creator : Digital Audio Workstation plugin

THX Spatial Creator is an immersive audio plugin for musicians and content creators using Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs). It is a positional audio rendering tool that helps artists transform mono or stereo audio into unbelievable binaural, 360-degree sound.

Project Goal:

Design and develop a user-focused and intuitive DAW plugin,
ensuring designs are up to industry standards that meets user needs while staying consistent in visuals with company’s brand guideline.

Role:
UX UI Designer, tester, partial front-end dev, marketing

Duration:
One year

Tools:
Figma, Adobe Suite, Reaper, VStudio, JUCE

Release Date:
Q4, 2023

Early Stages: Empathizing and Understanding

What?
Understanding the technology

Who?
Understanding the users

How?
How are users using similar plugins

Design meetings with stakeholders, engineers, potential users and others.

Market Research

User Interview

Competitor Analysis

Design Evaluation

Insights:

Users are used to seeing common UI trends in DAW plugins for better understanding of usability

Users enjoy trying out new features

Users enjoy experimenting with presets

Base technology unpolished

competitor dearVR plugin

Inspiration

Color

Typography

Components

Logo

UI elements

Adjectives

Minimal, Spatial & Immersive

Moodboard

Early stage high-fidelity mock up designs

Grasp a high level look & feel of design

Flush out any potential problems

Problem & Challenges

What
How can we make it less cluttered?

How
Through research, design meetings, iterating ideas, rapid brainstorming

Solution
Creating tabs to group controls that made sense usability wise
Helped design look more minimal

Before

After

Early stage low-fidelity mock up designs

Focus on:

layout

grouping

sizing

positioning of components

More Challenges

What
After more design meetings with the team, we feel and know that our plugin is lacking features and controls to stand out from competition

How
Research, Iterating & brainstorming ideas

Solution
Adding new feature: Motion

Implementing more camera controls

Motion feature path ideation

Adding Motion tab and new controls

Adding new feature: Motion

What
Figuring out necessary controls and adding them in while keeping in mind the user needs and consistency of entire design

High-fidelity designs

Finalizing UI components and designs to create final mock ups and prototypes for testing

Prototyping & Usability Testing

What
Demonstrate features and specific user tasks and flows

How
Conducted and recorded user testing

Insights & Solutions
Eliminated center sliders due to redundancy

Replace “speed” parameter with Beats & Bars for better musical understanding

Development

What
Created style guide for hand-off to engineer

Learned some basic front end coding to help out team due to limited resources

What
After the first public release, we gathered some insights based on user feedback

Insights & Solutions
Created a Higher Resolution sizing to accommodate for larger screen size users

Created more unique presets because users find it easy and fun to use

Version Update

Results, Reflection & Takeaways

Product resulted in great sales, positive brand name, and positive reviews

Experience co-leading a project from start to finish

I would love to gain more user insights and improve on features and usability

Cross functionality experience and getting work done with a small agile team + work environment with limited resources