Flycell is a world leader in mobile entertainment, music. They provide direct-from carrier services through AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Virgin, and many more.

I was hired on as the Director of User Experience and Information Architecture, a dual role which allowed me to not only provide customers with amazing mobile and web experiences, but helped better present the vast music offerings that were out there.

AJAX-based Subgenre Filtering

Say you like hip-hop, and select that genre. You will be presented with thousands of songs and artists. Going through all these can be daunting. Gangsta rap like NWA is presented right next to more subdued artists, like The Fugees. So identifying the subgenres, then presenting a useful user interface, was one of the first projects I had. Here's how I did it:

The default is to show all subgenres checked, thus displaying everything. This helps those customers who just want to browse the inventory, a process known as discovery. But for those customers who only want West Coast, they can uncheck everything but West Coast. Since going through and unchecking more than ten checkboxes is a bit much, we provide a Select All and Select None option. To select only West Coast, you'd select None, then select West Coast.

Two clicks: simple!

It was very important to me that this system was as fast as possible. Although you might see a quick "loading..." spinning wheel for a second or so, the developers assured me that they would optimize this, and today, it's lightning fast.

Over three years later this exact system is still in place.

Mobile Site

In 2008 the original iPhone had only been out one year and smart phones were still relatively new. But Flycell doesn't serve smart phones, it works mostly with feature phones. Since Flycell serves many countries including Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Italy, Mexico, Spain, and Turkey, persons in those countries are still, by and large, using the traditional feature phone.

So the requirement was that the mobile site needed to work mostly with these phones.

I redesigned the entire mobile site from scratch. Clean, simple, fast loading, and scalable were my personal requirements, as well as a few from senior management, such as featured artists. It needed to work with touchscreen phones but also cursor based feature phones.

Featured Artist Member Experience (FAME)

Record labels Island Def Jam and Universal granted Flycell the right to create fan clubs and artist communities to drive member engagement. VP of User Experience Lindsey Weinger and I came up with a pretty fantastic community-based portal which we code named FAME.

The premise was to create several pages for the top selling artists and give customers a place to engage further with the artist and other members who liked the artist.

This was way before Facebook's Become a Fan or Like. As such, we probably wouldn't do a community like this today, we'd leverage Facebook and Twitter, which have become so pervasive that there is really no need to reinvent the wheel.

However, as my designs reveal, we felt we had created something special here. It's also scalable. With CSS styling, you can add as many artists as you want. The only real difference are the database calls and the big background image. The rest is CSS-styled. You can add any artist you want by calling a different stylesheet and data - it's all database-driven. Yet each site feels a bit different and respected that artist's vision and style.