Juno City

Juno City is an app to listen to internet radio. I built it to prototype station collection and discovery. I was dreaming of a way to easily jump into a listening experience and bookmark stations without the hassle of creating an account.

I started with a few simple wireframes, and after a few mockups in Sketch went straight to HTML/CSS/JS to prototype the flow. The basic idea was simple, and seemed to work pretty well, but it was obvious without a list of actual internet radio stations to browse and listen to, the prototype wasn’t very useful for testing.

Real Content FTW

Finding twenty-five stations across a broad cross section of radio genres was a bit time consuming, but was ultimately worth it to be able to test.

I made a database to hold the stations and include things like category, tags, description—all the meta data that would make browsing and searching easier. After manually adding a couple stations, I realized how tedious it would be literally writing an SQL query everytime I wanted to add a new one—or even just to correct a typo. I made another interface that allowed me to add, edit and remove stations much more easily. With my new database tool, I quickly added the rest of the real content to the site.

the interface for adding stations to Juno City — This is the interface for adding a station to Juno City

Test, Test, Test

I had my prototype. I had real content. It was time to get it in front of some people for usability testing. Keeping it simple, I had one task: “Find and listen to some Jazz music.” I recruited family and friends put my design to the test.

I found a lot of areas for improvement. The interactions around selecting and deselecting categories were confusing, exiting search was clunky, and worst of all the interaction for starting and stopping the radio stream was not obvious.

##ß The Future of Juno City

Since that first round of testing, I’ve gone through several iterations of my process, improving a bunch of the interactions, but there’s still a long way to go. I think from a product design standpoint, I proved out a good, usable way to listen and find internet radio, but I’d love to keep it going. I need technical help to open source the project. I need curation help finding more stations to add. And if this ever turns into a real product, we’ll need to build relationships with radio stations to be able to help them raise money.

Check out the prototype at https://juno.city (best viewed on mobile).

Posted November 10, 2019