@AMP: The Artist-First Hub to Support Collaboration, Promotion and Career Navigation

To better understand the behaviours, motivations, and pain points of emerging musicians, I conducted interviews with 4 artists at different stages of their creative journeys.

This included singer/songwriters and producers who were either actively releasing music or consistently collaborating with others. From affinity mapping, I found 4 key themes that I took forward with me into the next stages of the project.

The insights I found through research marked a major shift in the product thinking moving forward.

What began as a visibility-focused exploration would now evolve into a more holistic outlook on the problem space where a digital solution could support musicians not just in being seen, but in career navigation and the work that goes into the backend of making, sharing and performing music.

Introducing Jaden, the fictional, research-backed persona who represents the interviewees that I had conversations with.

Developing a clear artifact helped me visualize exactly who I was designing for and became a resource to come back to throughout the process.

Creating an experience map helped me understand the exact journey that an artist goes through to release and promote music.

Having this laid out assisted in building the foundations of my knowledge of the problem space with a focus on the user. It also helped empathise with them better and identify areas for design intervention.

To ensure the platform addressed user needs and prioritized them, I translated user research insights into user stories. These helped me define functional requirements from the user’s perspective.

Once I had a set of user stories, I grouped them into epics that reflected key areas of the product. The three epics I picked were:

Having understood the main value my product would try to bring, I narrowed my focus down to the first two epics for the sake of time and scope of the project.

Instead, I decided to do a bit of concept testing on the last one during my user testing sessions and still consider the feature as a part of the application as organically as possible as if it were prototyped.

A competitor analysis revealed that there was a gap in the market for an artist-first career navigation platform.

While tools like Instagram and Fiverr were supportive of artists and main platforms for them to find an audience, collaborators and resources, they were too broad, didn’t cater to the music industry specifically and weren’t built for quick and efficient demo sharing. On the other hand, platforms like ReverbNation were too technical and focused mainly on marketing and analytics tools that felt tough to get a hand of.

After creating a mid-fidelity prototype based on my chosen sketches, I conducted usability testing with 10 users within my participant criteria to evaluate how intuitive the product appeared to them and whether it supported their existing workflows.

While users were able to complete core tasks without major friction, the sessions helped me uncover subconscious mental models that my users had, improve copy to align with music industry terminology, enhance feature functionality, and make the experience more tailored to how artists actually collaborate, plan, and promote in their day-to-day.

Having understood the main value my product would bring, its features and functionalities, I began thinking about the kind of brand I wanted to build around the platform.

The concept of amplification stuck with me. It came across as a clear metaphor associated with sound and music while also symbolizing growth, connection, and visibility.

From there, I locked onto Amplify but as I continued to use it, it felt predictable and lost in the sea of “-ify” startups. I chose AMP instead: bold, direct, and memorable. It captures the same spirit of elevating artists while giving the brand a stronger, more distinctive identity.

My initial vision for the application was inspired by funky, retrofuturistic music culture and bold LED-light colours that you’d find at a concert. But, after injecting the various colour schemes from the original exploration into the wireframes, I felt like the effect it had wasn’t what I intended.

This art direction once implemented was associated with astronomy or space or even a more sport-oriented aesthetic with the lime green.

So I went back to the drawing board and tried to pull back and simplify into a new vision for the brand that still represented the keywords I had in mind.

I focused on building a warmer palette, inspired by skater and music culture, what it means to be trendy and bold today.

The typeface I chose to express the wordmark is Tekno, sourced from Good Type Foundry.

Tekno is an extended display typeface with technologic features available in one weight/two styles. The extended width gives the text a stretched, rhythmic quality which can visually mimic beats or waveforms, creating a subconscious tie-in with music.

The logo was designed to reflect the core identity of the brand — forward-thinking, edgy and bold but still minimalist and professional.

The sharp angles and rounded nature of the form itself mimic the balance of these elements across the app and wordmark too.

I used the Atomic Design Methodology to ensure consistency and scalability across the product.

This system made it easier to maintain visual cohesion, iterate quickly, and design with flexibility as new features were added. It also laid the groundwork for developer handoff and future design scaling.

As I refined AMP, it became clear that while musicians rely on mobile for socials and discovery, many of their deeper career tasks are naturally done on a larger screen.

Designing a desktop app allows AMP to expand from a mobile companion to a comprehensive platform. A desktop version would support more robust task and calendar management and easier handling of media uploads, and planning.

• Mobile Phones — for Social Media, Messaging, Voice Memos

• Laptops — for Production, Business, Distribution, Zoom, DAWs

• iPad — for Sketching Ideas, Live Shows, Lyric Writing

8/8 users that tested the product in high-fidelity said they would use this product regularly.