Transforming daily commutes into a seamless social networking experience based on shared love for music.
Crafting a hyper-local music sharing and social experience app that mimics the fleeting nature of a commute.
5 MIN READ
Project Details
TEAM
Jake Villasenor
James DeLisio
Naomi Kim
Van Nguyen
ROLE
UI/UX Designer
AFFILIATION
COGS 123 (Social Computing) at UC San Diego
TIMELINE
6 Weeks
TOOLS
Figma
Google Suite
CONTRIBUTIONS
App design
Information architecture
Competitive analysis
Academic research
Rapid prototyping
00. CORE FEATURES
SHARE
Share the song you’re currently listening to with other users on the Walkman app.
INTERACT
Discover music and leave compliments to people within a 10-mile radius.
REDISCOVER
Had a busy commute? Check the History section to catch up on local music.
PERSONALIZE
Control your data and freely express yourself through your music interests.
01. BACKGROUND
Connecting people through the universal language of music.
For over a decade, music fans have used social networks to share their taste and see what others are listening to.
From Ty Cullen on YouTube in 2011, to Shan Rizwan on Tik Tok in 2021, from college campuses to downtown New York City, millions of viewers are dying to know: "what are you listening to?"
Walkman seeks to bring online social interactions back into your own neighborhood, and to leverage the forgotten power of the passing compliment. The passing compliment is a positive, ephemeral social interaction that has the power to change the entire outlook of your day for the better.
Building off of the popularity of viral music-sharing trends like "what are you listening to," and the untapped potential of location-based social computing experiences like Pokemon Go and Streetpass, Walkman presents opportunities for pseudo-anonymous, fleeting connections with everyday passersby through the universal language of music.
"What are you listening to?"
OUR MISSION
By taking advantage of pass-by connections, Walkman seeks to build diverse communities and trigger spontaneous social interactions automatically while users listen to music and walk in the moment without looking at their phone.
02. RESEARCH
Conducting an academic literature review.
To better understand proximity-based exchanges, online social interaction, and situated anonymity, I turned to existing academic research.
[1] Proximity-Based Automatic Exchange of Data in Mobile Gaming: Studying the Experiences of StreetPass Users (Paasovaara and Olsson, 2016).
[2] Facilitating Mobile Music Sharing and Social Interaction with Push!Music (Hakansson et al., 2007).
[3] Situated Anonymity: Impacts of Anonymity, Ephemerality, and Hyper-Locality on Social Media (Schlesinger, 2017).
Nintendo StreetPass: System Design for Proximity-Based Exchanges [1].
A 2016 survey about Nintendo StreetPass, a social gaming experience offered through the Nintendo 3DS, conducted by Susanna Paasovaara and Thomas Olsson (n = 105) revealed key sentiments from StreetPass users that helped us understand the needs of potential users of a proximity-based mobile app.
90% of participants reported taking their 3DS to different places to get more StreetPasses.
80% of participants were not concerned about automatic proximity-based exchanges of playful data on StreetPass.
62% of participants agreed agreed that they would be more concerned if this functionality were on their mobile phones.
73% of participants agreed agreed that it would be more interesting if they could have more meaningful interactions with other users.
Key insights extracted
Paasovaara and Olsson (2016) highlight that users are open to sharing non-sensitive, playful data, especially when it leads to serendipitous, low-effort interactions. To maintain engagement, proximity-based encounters should feel surprising and valuable over time. Users also want control over when and how they interact, preferring options to delay or manually trigger exchanges. Walkman’s design incorporates these insights by enabling user choice, emphasizing lighthearted, expressive data, and facilitating spontaneous yet meaningful local connections.
Push!Music: Facilitating Sharing and Social Interaction Through Music Sharing [2].
Push!Music interface
A 2007 research study conducted by Maria Hakansson et al. presents a Push!Music, a novel mobile music listening and sharing system for recommending music to nearby users depending on similar listening behavior and music history.
A user study consisting of 5 participants, a group of male friends ages 22-30 with a wide range of music taste, was conducted in order to extract design implications for music recommendation/sharing systems.
Using Push!Music, users can send songs to be queued in a receiving user's playlist, to which the receiver can explicitly rate songs. The following items highlight significant findings and design implications for music recommendation/sharing systems:
Receiving songs from another user was viewed positively, as a “treat.”
Social presence of other users is what makes the app exciting.
Users want to know that receivers listened to their recommended song.
Impression management features help users reflect a balanced self-image.
Key insights extracted
This study emphasized the importance of flexibility, customization, and impression management in user interactions. To support expressive and validating exchanges, Walkman includes quick reactions and comments while allowing users to control how they present themselves. By keeping the barrier to entry low and offering pseudo-anonymous profiles with customizable data visibility, Walkman encourages participation and fosters a positive, self-directed social experience.
Situated Anonymity: Impacts of Anonymity, Ephemerality, and Hyper-locality on Social Media [3].
A 2017 study by Schlesinger et al. examines how anonymity, ephemerality, and hyper-locality shaped the success of Yik Yak, a pseudo-anonymous social platform connecting users within a 10-mile radius.
Through interviews with 18 users from an urban U.S. university, the study found these features fostered casual engagement, transitory use, and an emergent sense of community.
They introduce the concept of situated anonymity—a context-specific state enabled by these design elements that encourages lightweight, disinhibited interactions. The Venn diagram below illustrates how these features intersect to support a dynamic online community.
An illustration of how anonymity, ephemerality, and hyper-locality work in tandem to foster community and provide an engaging user experience.
Key insights extracted
Walkman builds on Yik Yak’s framework of anonymity, ephemerality, and hyper-locality to foster community through shared music interests. Its pseudo-anonymous design encourages self-expression without tying content to personal identity. By showing only same-day content, Walkman creates a sense of intrigue and synchronicity, promoting casual, time-sensitive engagement.
Informing design decisions through survey insights.
Our team conducted a survey to gather insights on how individuals discover and share music while on the go. The survey contains responses from users aged 15-30+ years old, most of whom listen to music regularly during their daily commutes.
Key survey findings.
Common sources of music discovery
Appeal of a music sharing network
Concerns for localized music discovery
Desired features expressed
Social music discovery is the norm.
Participants primarily discover music through social platforms like TikTok and Instagram, Spotify’s “Friend Activity,” and word-of-mouth recommendations. This reinforces the idea that music is often a shared and socially driven experience.
Casual, expressive interactions are desired.
Respondents expressed strong interest in features that enable passive interaction—such as viewing nearby users’ current music (77.3%) and leaving anonymous likes or comments (72.7%). These features support Walkman’s goal of enabling lightweight, feel-good exchanges.
Connection over time matters.
Over half of the participants (54.5%) wanted access to an interaction history to revisit past musical encounters. This suggests that even in an ephemeral context, users value the option to reconnect with moments that stood out.
Privacy is a core concern.
Privacy was the top barrier to adoption. Participants voiced concerns over location-sharing and unwanted attention, suggesting features like location generalization, selective visibility, and pseudo-anonymity.
Usage contexts favor dense, social environments.
Ideal use cases for Walkman include college campuses, public transit, urban areas, and parks—settings where people naturally pass by others and might be open to casual, synchronous interactions.
Barriers to adoption.
Aside from privacy, users raised concerns about battery usage and the risk of low adoption in less populated areas. This highlights the importance of designing for both scalability and early-stage retention in high-traffic zones.
Design implications for Walkman.
Ultimately, these insights validated the potential of Walkman to offer serendipitous, hyper-local interactions through shared music, while also shaping how we address user trust, engagement, and context of use. This research directly informed our prioritization of Walkman’s features:
Ephemeral, proximity-based music sharing.
Anonymous compliments and reactions.
Optional interaction history.
Granular privacy controls and pseudo-anonymity.
A lightweight user experience that aligns with casual, mobile use.
03. PROTOTYPING
Simulating and testing the Walkman experience.
Walkman is supposed to be a seamless experience. To avoid bogging down the prototype with messy mockups, we took it back to design basics with post-it notes! To properly simulate the Walkman experience, we chose to recreate the two main phases of using the app:
Users walk around their community while listening to music, and pass by other Walkman users, exchanging information.
After their walk, users will browse their interaction history, and be able to leave hearts and anonymous comments that the original listener can see.
STEP 1: COLLECTING SONGS
Using wizard-of-oz prototyping techniques, our team filled out slides with what our participants most recently listened to.
STEP 2: EXCHANGE
Users walk around their community while listening to music, and pass by other Walkman users, exchanging information.
STEP 3: REACT
Users add reactions and comments on the slides with the songs they gathered from nearby Walkman users.
Simulation conducted via Google Slides
After our first prototyping session, we received feedback largely involving the logistics of our prototype setup. We were advised to choose a prototyping platform that was widely accessible to all users, without requirements for external downloads. Additionally, participants expressed slight confusion based on the initial prototyping instructions, which we adjusted in our second phase.
For our second round of in-class prototyping, we largely kept our setup the same, despite instruction adjustments to make it easier for users to participate. However, we did decide to include links to each song so that users could listen to the songs in real-time to comment and like more accurately. Additionally, we personalized our mock-interface to reflect our UI of our working-app design.
Revised prototype experience via Google Slides
Following up with our participants.
After completing our second round of in-person prototyping, we collected updated survey responses and feedback from our participants.
Overall, the feedback on the second iteration of our prototype was majority positive, with a few notes on logistics and suggestions to create more options of personalization.
All users rated their experience of using Walkman a 3 or higher on a 1-5 rating scale.
95.8% of users reported that the experience was easy to understand and navigate.
66.7% of users said that they were likely would use "Walkman" in their daily life.
Branding and visual design direction.
The Walkman app's branding and visual design are deeply rooted in our mission to foster serendipitous music discovery in urban environments. Drawing inspiration from the familiarity of established music platforms like Spotify, the interface adopts a sleek, modern aesthetic dominated by dark neutral tones. We went with a minimalist palette to immerse users in an app that emphasizes content while reducing visual noise.
To balance the neutral foundation, we chose vibrant shades of blue to serve as the app’s primary accent color. We use gradients from album covers and other vibrant colors for user profile pictures that add a layer of playful customizability, subtly encouraging interaction between users and the app. The usage of vibrant colors to contrast the dark theme gives Walkman an approachable yet sophisticated feel that keeps users coming back for more.
Visualizing the Walkman app experience.
To balance the neutral foundation, we chose vibrant shades of blue to serve as the app’s primary accent color. We use gradients from album covers and other vibrant colors for user profile pictures that add a layer of playful customizability, subtly encouraging interaction between users and the app. The usage of vibrant colors to contrast the dark theme gives Walkman an approachable yet sophisticated feel that keeps users coming back for more.
FEATURE 01
Discover music around you.
Home page
Nearby listeners
The home page is the user's entry point to Walkman, designed to create serendipitous yet meaningful connections through music. It showcases the user's current song, inviting reactions and compliments from nearby users.
The "Nearby Listeners" section further immerses users in their hyper-local environment, presenting a live, scrolling feed of music from other within a 10-mile radius. Users can also manually trigger the discover of new songs by refreshing the home page.
We leverage the vibrant colors of album covers to create unique gradients for each song card, crafting a dynamic and visually engaging experience that mimics the fleeting nature of a commute. Audio previews further amplify this connection by providing users with additional context to experience and engage with nearby music.
Your reactions and comments
Engage with people nearby
The home page prioritizes positive, ephemeral interactions, enabling users to react with customizable emojis or send compliments. Compliments can be written personally or sent through pre-written prompts, reducing effort and encouraging spontaneous acts of kindness.
By emphasizing lightweight engagement and user autonomy, Walkman's design fosters pseudo-anonymous social interactions without the toxicity of traditional social media.
Expanding on this, users can click on any song to access a dedicated song page, where reactions and compliments are centralized. This deeper dive fosters a sense of community through shared listening experiences.
To mitigate social comparison and reinforce authentic sharing, only the song owner can view the total number of reactions.
FEATURE 02
Rediscover your day.
See your area’s song history
See songs you interacted with
Check your daily stats
To accommodate for busy commutes and schedules, the Walkman app's history page gives user a chance to revisit the music and people they've encountered in the past 24 hours.
The "Nearby Listener History" section functions as a time capsule, showing what others have been playing in the past 24 hours. Users can revisit songs to engage asynchronously, keeping the Walkman experience dynamic and open-ended.
The "Today's Interactions" and "Interacted Songs" sections provide an organized summary of user interactions and song engagements. This structure encourages reflection and rediscovery while keeping the app's functionality simple and intuitive.
To create a sense of personal achievement at the end of the day, Walkman also tracks user-specific statistics about the amount of users they encountered, total listening time, and distance walked.
FEATURE 03
Build your identity through music.
Curate your public profile
Change information visibility
View songs you favorited
A user's profile section consolidates their most recent music interests, ranging from genres, artists, and songs on repeat while meaintaining pseudo-anonymity.
Users are assigned an uncustomizable tag (e.g. @wkmn123) but can change their display name and visibility settings for profile sections. Each section comes with a clear notice about its visibility (public, connections only, or private), giving users complete autonomy over how they share their information.
Users can also curate a list of favorited songs they've found through Walkman, of which they can easily open in their streaming app of choice or remove from the list.
FEATURE 04
Share healthy social interactions through connections.
Profile of a non-connected user
Request to connect
Connect to see more information
Visible information on a user’s profile
Walkman's connection system aims to foster healthy social interaction and emphasize user consent. Profiles of unconnected users are minimalist, displaying only the information they've chosen to make public. This approach to social interaction protects users' privacy while offering a glimpse into their music interests.
To unlock (potentially) more detailed information, users must send a connection request to another user. Once mutual consent to share information is established, connected users gain access to additional insights like top genres, artists, and songs on repeat. This information's visibility is customizable to ensure users remain in control of their shared data. By focusing on mutual trust and transparency, this design decision mitigates the risks of toxic social dynamics between users within a community.
FEATURE 05
Bringing users to Walkman.
Walkman push notifications
In order to minimize the annoyance of receiving too many notifications, Walkman notifications are designed to be sent sparingly and spark curiosity. These engaging notifications aim to encourage users to open the app and explore the music streaming in their immediate community. The notification system ensures that users stay connected to the music and people around them without overwhelming them. This sparing and thoughtful approach reinforces Walkman's goal of fostering organic, meaningful engagement centered around music sharing.
NEXT STEPS AND REFLECTION
Next steps.
As our relationship with technology evolves and shapes our interactions with the world around us, finding new ways to provide a low-pressure, casual opportunity to connect with community is a fun but difficult challenge. Walkman’s unconventional social features—ephemerality, hyper-locality, and pseudo-anonymity—facilitate the music discovery process in a way that has not yet been explored.
However, these features raise concerns of privacy and may unearth unexpected behaviors upon acquiring a critical mass. If given more time to continue this project, here are some next steps I would like to take:
Conduct a round of usability testing with our high-fidelity mobile prototypes to better understand how Walkman would work in a natural context.
Identify opportunities to monetize the app without detracting from the user experience.
Final thoughts and acknowledgements.
Working on the Walkman app concept was an incredible learning experience as a designer and researcher. I’ve always been inclined towards music, and being able to combine that love for music with my passion for connecting people was a great opportunity to learn about designing digital spaces and which features are best facilitate the community-building process. In particular, this project taught me a lot about synthesizing secondary and primary research results to inform key design features.
I would like to extend a warm thank you to the COGS 123 teaching team and our section classmates for their feedback and participation in our rapid prototyping sessions.
I’d also like to express my deepest gratitude to my teammates—James DeLisio, Naomi Kim, and Van Nguyen—for all of their hard work throughout this project. :)
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