Summary
We were tasked by the customer a simple easy site for listing the available songs of a karaoke show. A simple web app that would allow customers to browse a database of songs. The requirements were simple. Songs had to be listed per language, and the search should be over the whole database. Search could be against songs or artists, and it should be dead obvious to use. There should be no long text or instrucions, or complicated functionalitites.
It needed to be quick, responsive, requiring minimal effort for the users to perform two things, primarily, search, and adittionally, browse. It also required to display songs in the language of the users in the first welcome screen.
The site also required a simple backoffice functionality, a place to manually add, edit and tag songs to appear in web searches.
The result was an App that easy to use that the physical song lists were no longer needed. The mobile app was good enough experience to be fast, responsive, snappy and intuititve to browse the catalog without a cumbersome interface. When you don’t notice the interface and the tool simply does what’s expected from the users, then it’s designed correctly.
The result site works with vanilla javascript featuring Google Material Design, to deliver an intuitive fast loading and snappy search experience
Other small details were added after launch, such as infinite scrolling, or search at every keystroke.
After a few keystrokes, the searches are sent to Google Analytics to monitor users requests and interests. A Google Data Studio sheet would list the most common requests, to scan for songs users were looking that the business should acquire.
When the song was not found in the database, a simple contact form was added to the results page to submit a wish-to-add a new song as request.
As a next step, we wanted to create a client/server song request to be submited to the host in real time, but that meant ditching the books completely, which some customers did not appreciate. So the project ended in a simple mobile search engine with a couple of filters and all user interface help we could think of for a polished user experience.
