Overview
Music is more than sound; it’s an experience that connects people. While many music streaming platforms focus solely on providing access to songs, they often lack the sense of community that passionate music lovers crave. This project aimed to bridge that gap by designing an interactive music app where users can discover, discuss, and experience music together.
The app integrates social features with streaming, allowing users to:
Connect with friends and discuss their favorite music.
Join artist-specific groups to talk about concerts, new releases, and more.
Participate in live group-listening sessions.
Leave comments and ratings on songs.
Purchase concert tickets and band merchandise.
Watch live streams and podcasts with other fans.
Share favorite songs, personal playlists, and music-related content in a public social feed.
Problem Statement
Most music streaming apps focus solely on delivering content but fail to create meaningful social interactions around music. Music is a deeply personal yet communal experience, and fans often turn to multiple platforms, forums, social media, and ticketing sites to engage with their favorite artists and fellow listeners. This app aims to centralize these interactions, creating a seamless space for music consumption and community building.
The Design Thinking Process
Research & Discovery
Understanding user needs
Interviews
Competitive analysis
Ideation & Wireframing
Brainstorming concepts
Low-fidelity layouts
User flow
Branding & Visual Design
UI kit
Cohesive identity
Typography
Prototyping & Testing
Usability testing
High-fidelity prototype
Refining
Research & Discovery
We began the project with an in-depth competitive analysis to understand the current landscape of music platforms. We closely examined YouTube Music, Bandcamp, and SoundCloud, each offering different strengths and weaknesses:
YouTube Music offers extensive access to songs and videos, but limits social features mainly to comments under music videos.
Bandcamp has a strong community feel for independent artists and fans, but its discovery and social interaction tools are fairly static.
SoundCloud enables some interaction through comments on tracks and reposts, but lacks robust group features or community-driven discussion spaces.
Through this research, we identified common gaps: fragmented experiences, limited real-time interaction, and a lack of deeper social connection around music itself. To complement our competitive analysis, we conducted user interviews and surveys with casual listeners, superfans, and indie musicians. We learned that users craved richer, more personal engagement—things like live discussion around new releases, concert meetups, and collaborative playlist-building.
Ideation & Wireframing
Guided by our research insights, we defined a clear strategy centered on blending music consumption with meaningful community interaction. We developed:
User Personas that included a casual listener looking for discovery, a superfan who wanted closer ties to artists, and a creator seeking to promote their music socially.
User Flow Diagrams map out journeys like attending a live listening session, purchasing concert tickets directly after discovering a new artist, or joining a fan discussion group.
Information Architecture that prioritized a balance between listening, sharing, discussing, and buying, making it easy to switch between these activities without feeling lost.
Branding & Visual Design
Our visual system sought to amplify the emotional power of music while keeping navigation intuitive. Design choices included:
A vibrant, mood-driven color palette tied to the emotional quality of different songs and experiences, echoing the energy found in live concerts and music videos.
Bold typography and dynamic layouts to mirror the movement and intensity of music, while still maintaining readability and structure.
A color-coded system for tracks allowing users to immediately feel the emotional tone of a song before even hitting play—turning discovery into an emotional journey.
Prototyping & Interaction Design
Starting with low-fidelity wireframes, we experimented with different layouts for features like group listening rooms, artist fan hubs, and public feeds for sharing music-related content.
We quickly moved to mid-fidelity prototypes in Figma, refining interactive patterns like posting reactions to songs, starting a group listening session, or commenting live during an artist’s podcast stream.
Through user testing, we validated several important ideas:
Users loved the ability to instantly jump from a song they were listening to into a related fan discussion group.
Having access to merch and ticket links directly from artist profiles was a major win for music fans who usually have to hunt these things down separately.
Group listening needed better controls for shared playback and chat integration, which led us to propose customizable listening rooms for future development.
Reflection & Next Steps
Designing this app was both a creative and strategic challenge—an opportunity to think beyond traditional streaming services and truly reimagine what a music platform could be. By grounding our design decisions in user research and competitive analysis, we created an experience that blends discovery, connection, and community into one seamless platform.
One of the most rewarding aspects was seeing how deeply users resonated with the idea of shared listening and live discussion around music—a reminder that music isn't just something we consume, but something we experience together.
Looking ahead, there are exciting opportunities to continue refining and expanding the concept:
Deepening Community Features: Exploring even more personalized community spaces, like local fan meetups or artist-hosted AMAs (Ask Me Anything sessions).
Enhancing Real-Time Interactions: Developing richer real-time group listening controls, synchronized playback, and live chat improvements.
Polishing Emotional Visuals: Refining the color-emotion system to make the emotional journey of the app even more intuitive and visually impactful.
Expanded Competitive Benchmarking: Studying newer and emerging platforms for innovative social and discovery features that could inform future iterations.
Overall, this project affirmed the power of designing with emotion and community in mind—and showed how even small interactions, like a comment on a track or a shared listening session, can make a big difference in how people experience music.
Thank You
I’d like to give a huge thank you to Riley Scott and Tony for their creativity, collaboration, and critical thinking throughout this project. Their input was invaluable at every stage, from brainstorming features to refining the user experience. Working alongside such talented teammates made this project not just stronger but way more fun, and it wouldn’t have been the same without them.