Fellow designers and friends Rus Yusupov and Dominik Hofmann have created a beautiful and functional little web app called Big Human that's perfect for this series I'm writing on inspirational user interface design. Prepare to be inspired.
Big Human
In an effort to easily share music with one another, Russ and Dom designed an audio player that could import music from their blogs using RSS. Other people started listening too and Big Human was born.
They realized they had accidentally created a blogging platform that was specifically designed for audio blogging, while most are geared totally toward text blogging.
Moving Forward
The next step? Let everyone share their favorite audio blogs with one another! Dom and Russ decided to open it up and let anyone sign up to share RSS feeds of audio blogs with one another. Now Big Human is an undiscovered gem where audio bloggers can share their favorite music, and you and I can listen to uninterrupted tunes with one click.
Easy to use
I love how lightweight and easy to use the interface is. It's slightly reminiscent of iTunes, but less clunky, and you don't need to do anything but click play to enjoy endless streaming music from one audio blog after another.
When you visit the site for the first time, you're looking at the application. No need to sign up to use it, no need to log in.
Signing Up
If you do decide to participate, signing up will allow you to add feeds to the player that will be accessible by everyone. A nice UI feature is that signing up doesn't stop the music from playing; the registration form pops up in a nicely formatted javascript dialog.
Logging In
As with signing up, logging in uses a popup dialog as well, although for some reason the log in and log out functions cause the music to stop. Must be something to do with setting and killing a session.
An awesome personal touch is the custom messages that appear with your username once you're logged in.
I actually chuckled when I read that, along with the other random messages that bring a little personality to an otherwise common task: showing a user their username and letting them know they're logged in.
Other UI Goodies
It's pretty great that while each track is playing, Big Human shows you the first paragraph or so from the sourced blog post, with a link to read that entire post in a new window so the music doesn't stop.
Additionally, adding a feed is dead simple, even more so than signing up and logging in. Clicking the clearly labelled Add Feed button brings up a simple inline form for adding a feed. Presto.
In Closing
Big Human is a terrific example of UI and web application design today. A couple of guys decided to solve a problem, and created a simple, easy to use interface, knowing who their target users are and catering to the way they like to listen to music.
If you've found this helpful or interesting, please Digg It. What do you think of Big Human? Let other readers know by commenting.
