Chords
A responsive website and app for a new annual music festival that raises funds and awareness for prominent causes.
Role
UI/UX Designer
Timeline
Oct 2025 - Dec 2025
Products
Mobile App
Overview
Chords is a prototype social music streaming app that helps listeners build meaningful connections with music, musicians, and fellow users through unique features including song portfolios, artist lyric annotations, public user profiles, and more.
Goals
Designing an engagement-focused music streaming app to:
Help users learn more about their favorite songs and artists
Improve social sharing features to assist users in connecting with their peers
Increase the time spent by users in our app
Problem Statement
Listeners lack engaging ways to connect with music, artists, and other fans, making current streaming apps feel like simple playback tools rather than social or interactive experiences.
How Might We…
How might we create a more interactive and social listening experience that helps users feel connected to their music, favorite artists, and fellow fans?
DISCOVER
Understanding the Audience
I had many questions coming into my research process:
What is our main target audience?
What would motivate our target audience to switch over from other music streaming platforms?
How would we incentivize musicians and listeners to start using our app?
Research
User Research
To identify the target audience, we conducted 70+ online surveys and 12 in-person surveys and supplemented this with extensive online, data-driven research.
Competitive Analysis
We thoroughly analyzed current music streaming apps with similar initiatives to identify:
Site Strengths/Pain Points
Unique Features
Target Audience
Customer Acquisition Methods
Forms of Monetization
Affinity Mapping
Using the insights from my user research and competitive analysis, I created an affinity map to assist me in defining the key features for Chords.
DEFINE
Identifying Users & Features
Through my research, I gained a clear understanding of Chord’s user demographic and behaviors. This guided my decision making when selecting key features.
Target Audience
Avid music listeners aged 18–35 who are interested in learning more about their favorite artists but lack the necessary social features on their current music streaming app.
Their main pain points that they lack a communal space to share and appreciate music with others.
User Goals
Connecting with others who are interested in similar artists
Learning more about their favorite artists music and music making practices
Having access to see their friends listening activities
Being able to see personal listening analytics year round and publicize analytics to others in app
Key Features
Feature Matrix
After categorizing our feature ideas in a feature matrix to weigh their importance and decide which features that we wanted to implement, it became clear that the Chords app would differentiate itself from other music streaming apps by focusing on user-engagement through social features that other music streaming apps lacked.
Key Features
Song Portfolios
A new way for musicians to tell users about a song, the song-making process, and provide users with related content all in one place.
Artist Lyric Annotations
To help users connect with musicians and other users through artist-made lyric annotations.
Friend Activity Status
To help users connect with friends and discover new music.
Artist Stories/Livestreams
To give users additional ways to connect with musicians and increase user-engagement on the app.
Listening Analytics
To let users see their listening data year round and share it with other users in-app, supporting user-to-user connection.
EXPLORE
Designing a Solution
User Flow
Structure (Lo-Fi)
Song Portfolios
Artist Lyric Annotations
Artist Stories
Friend Activity Status
Listening Analytics
Mid-Fi
Song Portfolios
Artist Lyric Annotations
Artist Livestreams
Friend Activity Status
Listening Analytics
FINALIZE
Developing the Visual Identity
We designed our UI with the new liquid glass IOS UI in mind. Our goal was to create a unique UI that would still be familiar to users. Our name represents our app goal of helping users “strike a chord” with music, musicians, and other listeners. In music, a chord is a combination of 3 notes played simultaneously, which is why we made our logo a soundwave with 3 sound bars. Our colors differentiate us from other popular music streaming apps. We used a deep purple as our primary color to represent the deep connections we cultivate for our users.
UI
App Visuals
Song Portfolios
Artist Lyric Annotations
Artist Livestreams
Friend Activity Status
Listening Analytics
REFLECT
Key Takeaways
Delivery is key
My team and I were very focused on perfecting the concept/UI for the product to make it feel tangible and realistic to the judges. Due to the project’s tight timeline, we didn’t have enough time to perfect our pitch deck which made our pitch less convincing to the judges on presentation night. For future projects with tight timelines, I plan to devote more time to the pitch deck and presentation preparation by simplifying my concept and UI.