For a UX class at UC Santa Cruz, I worked with a team of 5 to design Melodics, a collaborative music producing platform. Much of the music producing software and applications available today often have overwhelming interfaces and a tough learning curve which can be discouraging for aspiring producers. Additionally, experienced music producers have limited avenues to safely share their music in production stages and obtain valuable feedback. Melodics solves these problems by

• Lowering barriers to entry for beginners, and
• Enabling collaboration and quick iteration directly on music stems

User Research: To better understand how to help both beginner and experienced music producers, we surveyed people from different backgrounds and asked questions centered around emotions:

• What do you feel during your process of making music?
• What challenges have you encountered while attempting to make music?

The survey revealed that beginners felt they lacked the ability, motivation, and time to learn complex production tools, while experienced producers felt that music production feels more like ‘work’, and not the enjoyable, creative pursuit it used to be.

Ideation & Planning: From our findings, we established a clear goal for Melodics: a playful, minimal production environment for new and seasoned music producers alike, where music-making is less of solo journey and more of a collaborative experience. To accomplish these goals, we created user personas to represent sentiments of our survey respondents, brainstormed features in FigJam, and composed a user flow diagram encompassing all of the possible actions the user can take, from creating an account to revising a music stem based on feedback received from other users.

Design & Usability Testing: From there, we sketched key frames onto paper, determined the color, font, and organizational schemes that best adhered to our goals, and finally turned our low-fidelity prototypes into a high-fidelity, interactive prototype with Figma, ready for usability testing. Using our participants' feedback, we iterated upon our prototype until we achieved a final design that satisfied our goals and requirements. Some improvements included redesigning our mascot (Mozart the Frog) to provide usage tips and enhance the user experience, and adjusting our fonts and icons to be more consistent and pleasing to the eye.

As a music and design lover, Melodics was easily one of my most favorite projects from my undergraduate career. Working through and understanding the UI/UX design process has fundamentally changed the way I develop software and applications, and taught me to always approach problems from a user/stakeholder standpoint. Since then, Figma has been a staple in personal design and development process.