MOD’s goal with their kiosk touchscreen applications has always been to create an attractive, easy to use interface unlike anything else available. It also had to be relatively simple in order to allow the software itself to run smoothly on the minimalist hardware available. At the same time, the MOD media store is a tremendously robust system supporting hundreds of music artists, millions of songs and thousands of movie titles. At the time, the MOD music store was only capable of physical fulfillment, requiring users to choose the music they wanted and then burn to a custom CD. After initial trials with Circuit City and Best Buy it was determined that the entire process needed refinement to make selecting songs and creating mixes more intuitive and easier to comprehend. I wanted to break the mold of designs that we had been doing the year prior.

“Smoke” was an entirely different take on the music store format. It featured large cover art to engage the user and zooms to draw the content closer when a customer wanted more information and zoomed out again to get the whole picture. It focused on one particular element at a time to bring that aspect in to focus, yet other pertinent details were always just a single tap away.

The mix creation and fulfillment were the most refined and easiest to use that the system had ever seen. It took out all the complex options a customer could do and instead focused on what they wanted to do. The result was a clean, intuitive checkout system that simplified and cleared up previously confusing decision trees. Unfortunately, “Smoke” never made it past the concept stage as the business model and entire MOD system would change shortly afterward.