IDAGIO App

IDAGIO offer video and audio streaming to music lovers in over 190 countries worldwide. Their acclaimed audio streaming service is unique and features optimised metadata, curation of playlists and content by music-lovers for music-lovers compliment the app.

At the core of the product is the App and it’s search function tailored to classical music. It’s home to over 2 million licensed tracks, lossless audio, personalised recommendations, expert-curated playlists and exclusive recordings you wont find anywhere else.

IDAGIO approached me to redesign and create several areas’s of the native app interface, this included;

1. Improving the search function and filtering system
2. Redesigning the login and signup UI and improving the UX
3. Introducing a brand new concerts section where users can stream high quality online concerts, operas, ballets and documentaries
4. The creation of a playback queue
5. Employment of hot links giving users instant access to playback tracks, browse curated playlists and browse the extensive catalogue based on unique user preferences.
6. Introduce a new dark mode theme.

Once this work was completed, I also redesigned their website that employed the same dark aesthetic to showcase the app with it’s sleek and more appealing interface.

I created a new dark-mode colour palette and UI theme for their native app, transforming the original light interface into a more modern, polished, and visually engaging experience.

The dark mode also offered a more comfortable viewing experience in low-light settings, which many users prefer.

The main benefit of dark mode is that it throws focus on individual parts of a screen providing a visual respite from overstimulation.

From a design perspective, dark mode presented some interesting challenges and opportunities. On the one hand, it was more difficult to design for dark mode because it was vital that I considered not only colour contrast but also the use of shadows, highlights, and other visual cues to ensure that elements were clearly visible.

On the other hand, it also provided an opportunity to be more creative and experimental and challenge the ‘academic’,’older generation’ stereotype that is often associated with this music genre.

Designing the UI and UX for dark mode also had implications for accessibility. Whilst it was important to ensure that the designs were accessible to everyone, I also recognised that some people with visual impairments may find that dark mode makes it easier for them to read and interact with the content. This underscores the importance of designing with accessibility in mind and offering options for users with different needs.

A fundamental aspect of the product revolves around its customised search function designed for classical music. IDAGIO had an already robust algorithm, however in order to improve the UX I proposed tweaks to the query processing and ranking to improve the candidate retrieval with a stricter latency of result capture. With this in place, I went on to design a search UI which automatically updated after each character step, providing users with instant search result without the need to press search or finish typing an entire query.

Pre-redesign IDAGIO also experienced an issue with there onboarding system, with a surge of bounce rates occurring at signup and validation issues on login for current users. This left users feeling lost and frustrated or not knowing exactly what happened. To solve this, I designed a new, intuitive and responsive sign-up form based on a hybrid reward-early, punish-late approach.  By improving the default behaviour and aligning it with a more streamlined UI, users were able to complete the process more seamlessly, leading to increased user retention and successful subscription upgrades.

I created a dark mode interface that feels natural, modern, and focused on ease of use. By keeping the palette minimal and relying on a single accent colour, IDAGIO could move fluidly between light and dark modes while keeping content clarity front and centre. Thoughtful UI execution and a user-led design process resulted in a smoother experience overall and supported increased engagement – helping the app grow to more than 1.6 million downloads.