How to You Organize a Library: The Info Architecture of Epidemic Sound

New Toy

Epidemic sound is a website I use for video production.

It offers royalty free music for the videographer and will be a perfect asset as we build our video team. I just received access to it today and so I decided to document its information architecture as I learned to navigate the service and see what I can with it.

On first arriving at the site it is clear that it is designed as a filtration system to help the user quickly find what he or she wants for a new video project.

Heck, it sorts music by beats per minute. This is some serious stuff.

We have 5 options on the main nav bar that give the user a starting point. And it is pretty intuitive, you can choose by browse which is a page that lets you filter by category, and you can also check out my album, which is similar to Spotify’s explore feature which sorts music by playlists based of the genre.

The SFX section looks different and you can only filter by one parameter.

And the latest tracks is a news feed of uploads. The good thing is there is a red highlight on active pages. The search feature gives you a dropdown of results but it doesn’t take you to a new page. So far it is a pretty straightforward web App. For this assignment, I want to focus on how the info architecture is site mapped when it comes to filtered content. How does that look? This is a sitemap I put together mapping the browsing experience:

The real key to putting together correct information architecture in a library is understanding how to filter parameters based on placement and order.

Questions to ask if constructing a library is how to your filter a person to their ideal selection? Epidemic sound teaches us that you need to start broad in Genre and then go to the mood you want to feel. The mood is important because its a video creators platform, so how do you want your viewer to feel as they watch your video? Whats the texture you want? That’s can be found in movement.

So if you want to build a library that helps people find the right asset to complete a goal, you go left to right, broad to specific, and you allow for a wide array of parameters to give the user the experience of know what is right for them.

This works well for videographers who don’t have a great taste in music, but they can find the exact specs they want to complete a goal.

Imagine an actual library that helped you find the correct book to prioritize your reading? Instead of reading what is interesting, you filter through the library based on goals you want to accomplish, to the style of the prose (Is it narrative or highly technical? What sounds better for an audiobook? etc).

Epidemic Sound is a great example of sourcing of creative assets at scientific accuracy because it takes into account that you don’t have time to listen to a whole library to find the right song. This product gives you your time back, which is essential to videographers.

“How can you design a web apps architecture to contains a large library of tools without it taking persons time?”

Originally published at CadenD Studios.