Every set, every track, every ID
About the project
KIP is a mobile app for electronic music: listen to DJ sets, see what is playing, and save the tracks, artists and labels you find along the way.
In electronic music the best tracks are often heard first in someone else’s set, an hour-long mix from a club or a festival, and then they are hard to pin down. KIP’s promise to its listeners was simple: know what track is playing without reaching for Shazam, keep it in your profile, and hear when an unreleased track, an ID, finally comes out.
We designed the app in two rounds: a first version of 16 screens, then a final one of 17, from sign in to the player. Home, four ways to explore, detail pages for sets, tracks, artists and labels, the player, the profile and notifications.
- Client
- KIP
- Stage
- New App, Two Rounds
- Services
- Mobile App Design · UI/UX Design Services
- Platform
- Mobile App
- Timeline
- From August 2024
The challenge
The music lives in the set. The apps are built for songs.
Most music apps are organised around songs and albums. Electronic music fans listen differently. They follow DJs, play recorded sets from clubs and festivals, and dig through what each set contains: who made that track, which label put it out, what else the artist has played. Some of the best tracks in a set have no name yet. They are IDs, unreleased, and fans wait months to find out what they were.
So KIP could not just be a player with a search bar. A set had to be as important as an album, its track list had to lead somewhere, and every artist and label had to be a door to more music. And it had to feel like the scene it serves: dark, visual and confident, not like a spreadsheet of track data.
The product
Press play, then keep digging
Home, Explore and Profile on one bar, and a player that follows you everywhere.
Home opens on featured sets, each with its DJ and the mix, club or festival it comes from, then the newest tracks. Once something is playing, a small player sits above the navigation, so you can keep browsing without losing the set.
Four ways in, each with its own line: Sets, “dive down the rabbit hole with musical journeys”; Tracks, “crate dig through new & old cuts”; Artists, “musical talent from around the world”; and Labels, “only independent labels & producers”. Genre filters from Afro House to Breaks and UK Bass narrow any of them, sorted by most popular or newest.
A set page shows the DJ, the curator and the full track list. A track shows its label and more tracks like it. An artist page opens with their own words, how many sets they have and how long they run. A label shows who founded it and its sets. Each one links to the others.
The player puts the artwork first, with the curator, genre and date as tags, a queue, sharing, shuffle and repeat, and a drawer to jump back into sets, tracks, artists or labels. The profile keeps what you have liked in five lists, sets, tracks, artists, labels and the IDs you are watching, beside your account and notifications.
The idea
The set is the album
Sets get the space other apps give to albums: a full-bleed photo of the DJ, where it was recorded, who curated it, and the whole track list underneath. A set is something you can like, queue and share, not just a long file.
Four crates, one layout
Sets, tracks, artists and labels share one explore screen, the same lime header, the same genre filters and the same grid. Switching between them feels like moving to the next crate in a record shop, not opening a new app.
Follow the unreleased
An ID is a track with no name yet. KIP keeps the IDs you are watching in your profile, next to everything you have liked, and was built to tell you when one is released, so the track you heard at three in the morning is not lost.
Dark, with the music up front
The first round showed every detail on every card: BPM, key, genre and date. For the final round we let the artists and cover art lead, on a near-black screen with Helvetica and two bright accents, lime and electric blue, and kept the detail for the pages where people go looking for it.
Impact
A music app built around the set
KIP went from a first round of 16 detailed screens to a final design of 17, where DJ sets come first and every track, artist and label leads to more music. Listeners can play a set, see what is in it, follow the IDs they are waiting for, and keep digging through four connected ways to explore.
17
Final screens
16
First-round screens
4
Ways to explore
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