Interlude
Driving Visibility, Engagement, and Community for Emerging Music Artists
Interlude is a music-centered social media platform that I conceptualized and designed from 0 to 1. Interlude aims to foster meaningful connections between emerging artists and listeners through authentic storytelling and community-driven discovery – inviting exploration beyond what’s surfaced by mainstream platforms. We strive to transform passive listening into more impactful discovery experiences, offering artists a sustainable path to growth while empowering listeners to connect with music in a more engaging way.
Product Designer & Researcher
2 product designers, 1 engineer, 1 data scientist
Sep 2024 – May 2025
OVERVIEW —————————————————————————————————————————————–
MY ROLE
THE TEAM
TOOLS
Figma, FigJam
TIMELINE
We started this app as a group of music lovers who have seen how difficult it is for emerging artists to build their circle of listeners in today's music landscape. This shared understanding and a desire to reimagine how discovery works sparked Interlude: a project aimed at supporting emerging talent as they find the right audiences to grow with.
To begin addressing this challenge, we needed to understand the current state of the system: what's getting in the way?
PROBLEM SPACE ——————————————————————————————————————————–––
We analyzed the following platforms to understand how existing products support, or fall short in supporting, emerging artists and music discovery. From this, I started identifying gaps in the emerging artist experience, specifically around visibility and community building, understanding which discovery mechanisms were more or less engaging, and pinpointing where our product could differentiate itself in the market.
We conducted a total of 19 in-depth, semi-structured user interviews with three groups:
Listeners – to explore how they discover new music and artists, what tools and methods they rely on, and what motivates them to engage with lesser-known talent
Artists – to understand experiences promoting music, building an audience, and how current recommendation systems influence their visibility and growth
Industry stakeholders – to broaden our perspective on artist development and exposure, we spoke with a data analyst at a major streaming platform, a manager of an independent record label, and a live event coordinator at a local radio.
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
ARTIST, LISTENER, AND STAKEHOLDER INTERVIEWS
KEY RESEARCH FINDINGS
FEATURE PRIORITIZATION & INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
These insights gave shape to our product vision and strategy, helping us define what needed to be built and why.
We began refining our concept by asking:
How can we help artists build deeper, more personal connections with listeners and a create a space where authentic self-expression is rewarded?
How might we leverage social features to enable a more sustainable, community-powered approach to music discovery?
What would it look like to design a recommendation system that actively supports emerging talent?
Based on our research insights, we prioritized key features before developing information architecture maps for both artists and listeners to help organize core flows.
RESEARCH ——————————————————————————————————————————–––——
OUR SOLUTION ——————————————————————————————————————————–––––
A community-driven platform for discovering and connecting sustainably and authentically with emerging artists.
Five personalized song recommendations, refreshed daily, at the top of the home page to encourage regular discovery.
Discover listener-curated playlists, profiles, music, and local artists/events.
Curated post categories to help artists showcase their music and lives.
A centralized hub organizing all of an artist's content to spotlight who they are as an artist and person.
Interactive feed that displays following content from artists and friends, allowing listeners to respond, engage, and share media through familiar social actions.
Discover and register for live events from followed artists and friends.
A Community for Authentic
Artist Expression
The two core components of our solution:
Artists have a space to speak authentically about themselves and a community where listeners can understand their creative journey on a deeper level.
Increasing Music Discovery of Smaller Artists
By delivering music to listeners through an inverse recommendation system prioritizing music from smaller artists, we make music discovery more equitable.
MUSIC DISCOVERY – DAILY RECOMMENDATIONS
Why? We limit the number of daily recs to avoid the recommendation fatigue that we found listeners experience on mainstream platforms. Narrowing the scope also helps listeners engage more deeply with each track, making discovery feel more meaningful.
Why? This bridges the digital and real-world connection between artists and listeners, as well as between listeners and other listeners at fan-hosted events, reflecting usability feedback from both groups on the importance of live events in deepening fan engagement. I placed this feature in its own tab to make live events more prominent, reinforcing Interlude's core focus on social connection.
inverse rec system ACCOUNTS FOR artist popularity to BOOST songs from lesser-known artists
Swipe up on mini-player to access the song page, where listeners can discover the story behind the music, watch supporting videos, and share lightweight feedback.
This feedback refines the listener vector, fine-tuning future recs without disrupting the discovery experience. I designed this feedback system to give users more control and demystify how their input influences what they hear, addressing frustrations I heard from listener interviews with opaque algorithms on other platforms.
MUSIC DISCOVERY – LIVE EVENTS
MUSIC DISCOVERY – SEARCH
COMMUNITY FOR AUTHENTIC ARTIST EXPRESSION – A SUITE OF POST CATEGORIES
Why? Search serves as a community-driven discovery tool by giving listeners more agency in how they explore music. It allows for more input-based and context-aware recommendations. By shifting some of the discovery process into users' hands, my goal in designing this feature was to balance out algorithmic recommendations with friend recommendations and situational relevance.
Why? Inspired by the ways we found that artists already connect with fans, these structured formats provide a framework that encourages authentic and ongoing storytelling, reinforcing our hypothesis that deeper, more personal connections between an artist and their listeners lead to a more dedicated audience base.
Why? I designed the home feed to host a dynamic space where fans, artists, and friends connect organically, fostering the sense of community that's at the heart of Interlude. By enabling real-time interaction and sharing, it strengthens connections, keeps content circulating, and transforms music discovery into a collective social experience.
Includes song-specific and album-specific pages to allow listeners to take a deep dive into the creative process that goes into any piece.
Artists can post content about themselves…
Video check-ins
Messages
Articles and blogs
Interviews
Live events
Merch
…or content about their music:
Songs and albums
Stories behind the song/album
Unreleased demos to share the songwriting process
Interviews
Playlists to show music inspiration
Music videos
COMMUNITY FOR AUTHENTIC ARTIST EXPRESSION – COMPREHENSIVE ARTIST PROFILES
COMMUNITY FOR AUTHENTIC ARTIST EXPRESSION – THE HOME FEED
USABILITY TESTING & ITERATIONS —————————————————————————————————————–––––————––––––
Between iterations, I conducted usability testing of mid- and high-fidelity prototypes with 5 artists and 10 listeners to:
Evaluate the usability of key features
Assess the clarity of navigation
Understand if the platform addressed users’ needs for discovery, engagement, and connection
One of the main artist flows enables them to create posts for a song-specific page, allowing them to share updates, behind-the-scenes content, or reflections tied to one particular track.
In the initial design, artists create a post as usual and then have the option to tag a song afterwards. However, usability testing revealed that this approach was unintuitive, as artists either wouldn't know that song-specific posting was possible until midway through the post creation process or assumed that tagging a song was a required step for all posts.
To address this, we created a more intentional entry point for song-specific posting through multiple rounds of ideation, iteration, and testing. When artists begin creating a post, they are prompted to choose between two clear content types: "Share something about your music" or "Share something about yourself." Selecting the music-focused path leads directly to an option to post on a song page, clearly communicating that posts can be optionally tied to a specific track.
Listeners found the feedback mechanism for daily recommendations unintuitive and disengaging; some missed the swipe feature, leading to confusion about how to provide feedback, while others misinterpreted the icons as liking or saving a song. Even when used, the binary options felt limiting and listeners were unsure of how their input would influence future recommendations.
To address this, I designed a more open-ended feedback system that gives users greater clarity and control over how their input shapes recommendations. The final design integrates the feedback directly into the song page to improve visibility. I wanted to prioritize capturing more qualitative input without disrupting the listening experience, so I introduced lightweight, tappable interactions that feel playful, quick, and can be done seamlessly while scrolling or listening.
Listeners saw live event discovery as a standout feature for a socially-driven music app, but its placement deep within the navigation hierarchy made it difficult to find and diminished its perceived importance. In response, I decided to replace the notifications tab with a live events tab to give this feature the visibility it needed.
A MORE INTUITIVE FLOW FOR POSTING TO SONG PAGE
A PLAYFUL APPROACH TO LISTENER FEEDBACK
OPTIMIZING NAVIGATION TO SURFACE CORE FEATURES
INITIAL DESIGN
FINAL DESIGN
CROSS-FUNCTIONAL COLLABORATION & MVP —————————————————————————————————————–––––————––––––
With close cross-functional collaboration with my engineering and data science team members throughout the full product development lifecycle, my designs were implemented into a functional MVP web app that integrates our recommendation system and community features, allowing artists to share and listeners to interact with content on the app in real time.
Collaboration with engineering included aligning on technical feasibility, product requirements, and feature prioritization for the MVP. I also built a design system including component libraries and UI style guides to improve consistency and development efficiency.
I partnered with data science to integrate recommendation system requirements into the onboarding flow design, iteratively evaluate the recommendation system, and co-develop a feedback mechanism to refine recommendation accuracy.
IMPACT —————————————————————————————————————–––––————–––––––
Early testing indicates that Interlude is delivering on its core goals. We plan to continue measuring impact through metrics such as increase in number of artist streams, followers, and views, as well as user discovery and engagement metrics including skip rates, playlist adds, saves, CTR on recommendations, and number of new artists discovered per month/year.
WHY WAS THIS PROJECT WORTH DOING?
NEXT STEPS —————————————————————————————————————–––––————––––––
Based on positive feedback from artists and listeners, we're excited about the potential of releasing Interlude publicly. If we move forward, we plan to partner with smaller artists to help promote the app, ensure our full-stack application can scale to support more users, and develop a sustainable business model.
One of our goals is to build our own popularity metric so we do not have to rely on Spotify's data. This would allow us to recommend smaller and emerging artists more fairly. We also plan to keep improving our recommendation system by updating user vectors with richer data, including sub-genres, mood preferences, and social behavior, to better capture listener tastes.
WHAT I LEARNED —————————————————————————————————————–––––————––––––
Validating Decisions in a 0-to-1 Product
Building a product from the ground up brought a lot of unique opportunities for learning, one being that validating design decisions through ongoing user research seemed even more necessary when designing a concept from scratch. It would've been easy to rely on our own vision and assumptions especially when so close to the product, but staying closely engaged with users at all phases kept me grounded and confident that we're designing a product that will actually be meaningful to those who will be using it.
Scoping with Intention
With endless possibilities and limited resources, I realized that deciding what not to build was just as important as deciding what to build. Every feature had to be backed by a clear rationale rooted in user needs, technical feasibility, and long-term vision alignment. Separating core MVP requirements from "nice-to-haves" that could come later if Interlude scaled helped me stay focused, manage complexity and ambiguity, and ship faster without losing sight of future potential.
Designing for an Ecosystem
I learned the importance of considering stakeholders beyond our primary users – while artists and listeners were our main focus, we knew that artists don't navigate the industry alone – they're influenced by a broader network of people around them, so we set out to understand the ecosystem of stakeholders that shape their journey, including a manager of an indie record label and a live event coordinator for small artists. Their input shaped how Interlude could better integrate into real-world workflows, partnerships, and incentive structures. This ecosystem-level thinking made our product vision more holistic and helped me move beyond isolated user problems to understand the broader motivations, pressures, and challenges influencing behaviors across the entire music ecosystem.
Thanks to my team!