Hello. This is Matthew Irvine Brown's portfolio.
Last.fm work
November 2007 - November 2009
I worked as Lead Interaction Designer for Last.fm between November 2007 and November 2009. I got to work on a wide range of projects, from the website, to desktop software, to mobile phone apps, and integration with hardware partners.
I got to listen to nearly all the key voices in the day-to-day running of things - from users, to advertising partners, to business development and so on, and the work spanned from service design and strategy, to defining use cases and user testing, to implementation details such as UI and icon design.
Working on the website meant working on nearly every facet of music experience we can think of - acquiring music; owning it; describing it; listening to it; sharing it; identifying with it - and so on.
The site has over 30 million users - so nearly every design decision involved observing their behaviour. I got to work with data tracking specialists, where we teased out information about interactions and paths users took around the site. I produced diagrams such as these in order to help inform key bits of decision-making.
A lot of my work involved grouping trends and patterns of behaviour seen around the site, to help better define what got built and how to improve it. These took the form of anything from formal diagrams to rambling streams of consciousness drawn during the course of heated discussion, when notes and thoughts translated into working prototypes within a matter of minutes. I tended to run between strategy/planning people and developers, helping to turn sales pitches into prototypes, and vice versa.
I got to test raw prototypes directly with users, often organising impromptu meetings in cafes to test things out in a quick and dirty way. These results were mixed with more formal user testing methods and feedback on discussion forums, meaning we got very rich responses to the things we build, both while we were building them and after we released them.
I worked with Last.fm's hardware partners, such as Sonos, Logitech, Apple, Android, Motorola, Microsoft and so on, working with external teams to align Last.fm's user experience on third-party devices, such as the iPhone and Xbox 360.
I worked on detailed implementation too, especially on bespoke applications such as those for iPhone, Android and Xbox Live. I worked side-by-side with developers, where we collaborated and overlapped, building, tweaking and testing everything in one place. In these situations I designed the user interface and produced all the graphics, such as skins, icons, typography, layout, animations and so on.
The Last.fm iPhone app was chosen to run on a series of national TV spots run in the UK during February and March 2009.
I was lucky enough to have worked with some amazing developers, who blur the lines between business requirements, branding, design and development. More often than not I got to jump from outlining services and interaction in broad strokes, to the trenches, supplying developers with graphic assets to put together UI elements. The best work usually emerged when there were as few steps as possible between these points. Sketching in code as well as on paper, and winning arguments with prototypes, was particularly rewarding.