PM UX: Block Rocking Beats

The Smashing Cartoons by Smashing Magazine

This week we’ll be looking at Figure, a neat and super simple music-making app by Propellerhead Software. Figure allows even the most off-beat, tone-deaf, musically challenged individuals to create fairly decent sounding music.

Unlike other music apps, such as Garageband, Figure takes a much more simplistic approach that lets users pick up and play without much of a learning curve.

How it Works

Figure keeps things easy by minimizing the functionality available to users, making it more of a beat making app than a full-out music production tool.  It only gives users a variety of bass, drums and lead synths to work with.

Users also don’t have the ability to input notes as they can with other more complex music production apps. Instead – and we think for their own good – they are limited to using a pre-quantized range of notes.

Figure provides users with some pretty cool rhythm wheels, which play notes in preset patterns and rhythms. The use of these rhythm wheels makes it very easy to stay on the beat and not stray off into the weird noise area.

Touch Away

Figure is all about interacting and touching, which I believe makes the experience more engaging and enjoyable. It utilizes the iPhone’s touchscreen beautifully by using every last bit of touchable real estate.  I was impressed with how intuitive the touch controls were and how natural it felt to tap, drag, swipe and draw while making music.

Great UI

The interface in this app was simple, intuitive and looked pretty darn cool to me. Th colour coded tabs to spread out the functionality worked well as I never found myself taking time to search for anything. I could always see where everything was and didn’t need to put any thought into how to get there.

At first, I found the blue touch fields in the pattern tab to be a little too small for my liking. Then I learned that by rotating my phone into landscape view, I could have just those four touch fields take up the entire screen, making it much easier to tap out some beats.

Pattern tab in landscape view.

Save? Share?

After creating my first masterpiece, I was pretty disappointed to discover that I couldn’t save or share my craftsmanship with the world. At the very least I think we should be able to save a few of our creative audio endeavours, but find the lack of sharing particularly perplexing as most apps have some sort of social networking element built in. I’m curious to know the reason behind this and if these options were even considered. The search for answers continues. Have any insights? Tweet us @plasticmobile and put my curiosity to rest.

The Final Beat

Figure is a fun way to pass time and be creative. It doesn’t require much to learn how to use it and, more importantly, doesn’t require any musical talent to use.

However, it is missing two pretty significant and obvious features. The option to save would give users the ability to go back and listen to their creations, and the option to share would let them brag to all their friends about their beat-making skills!

There has been a lot of buzz around the iPhone and obviously some brands are jumping on the opportunity to reach their consumers on this new and exciting medium.

On my iPhone blog, I discussed an application that Charmin did in partnership with a mobile company in the US and its now nice to see that brands in Canada are not only catching up but are sometimes ahead of their American counterparts.

Mazda Canada is one example of a brand that has now entered into the mobile playing field and has done so ahead of their Mazda counter parts in the US.  They have recently released an iPhone application called Concert Quest that allows Canadians to search (based on their location) for upcoming concerts in their cities.  Mazda has very delicately branded a utility music application for users that are in the market to find concerts.   They have coincided the launch of this application with the launch of their new Mazda 3.  Mazda has made a great entry into this space and it will be nice to see others join them in the near future.

Branded applications are likely going to become more popular as brands work to differentiate themselves and enter the mobile space.

Got an iPhone? Try it out for yourself: Concert Quest iPhone app