Harmoniq

Project Overview

Harmoniq is an AI-powered music creation platform that lets anyone generate studio-quality tracks from a simple text prompt — no musical experience required. The value proposition: "Turn your ideas into music in seconds." The product targets both casual creators looking to explore sound and serious musicians wanting to prototype ideas rapidly.

The design challenge was significant: AI music tools often feel either too technical (DAW-like complexity) or too toyish (novelty apps with no depth). Harmoniq needed to land squarely in between — expressive, fast, and capable — while keeping the interface invisible enough that the music takes centre stage.

Design Challenges

✔️ Designing a Create flow that felt expressive and fast — text prompt → genre/mood/style controls → generation — without requiring musical vocabulary from users.
✔️ Building a Discover / Explore experience where community tracks (organised by genre: Electronic, Ambient, Cinematic, Lo-fi Hip Hop, Synthwave, Jazz, R&B, etc.) were browsable and immediately playable.
✔️ Designing a persistent bottom player bar that showed the currently playing track, controls, and progress without disrupting the main browsing experience.
✔️ Creating a Library view that helped users organise, annotate, and revisit their generated tracks — distinguishing clearly between personal creations and saved community tracks.

Design Process

1. Research: Analysed Suno, Udio, and Mubert UX; identified that genre taxonomy and playback immediacy were key drivers of session depth.
2. Information Architecture: Built a 5-section navigation: Create, Library, Explore, Pricing, Profile — keeping the generation action always one tap away.
3. Explore Screen: Designed a featured track hero banner + 3-column grid of community tracks with genre/mood tags, duration, and play counts — full-screen music card aesthetic.
4. Persistent Player: Placed a docked bottom player across all screens with waveform seek bar, shuffle/loop controls, and track metadata — mimicking the Spotify mental model.
5. Visual System: Deep purple/navy dark palette with purple-blue gradient accents and high-contrast white text. Glassmorphic sidebar panels and card backgrounds for depth without heaviness.
6. Freemium Conversion: Designed an in-context usage meter showing songs consumed against the free plan limit, with an Upgrade to Pro CTA embedded in the sidebar — converting at the moment of value realisation, not before.

Outcome

Harmoniq's UI strikes the balance between creative freedom and structural clarity. The prompt-first creation experience, expressive dark visual language, and immediate playback feedback make it feel like a professional creative tool — while remaining accessible to users with zero music production experience.