Project Summary

• SR1 is a music royalty management system owned by City National Bank.
• I was brought on to the project to do a complete redesign of the product.
• The goal was to modernize the product by turning it into a web app.

The Challenge

• The product is meant to help labels, producers and distributors manage their music catalogs and pay out royalties according to deals correctly and easily.
• Exactuals the subsidiary of City National Bank that worked on this product wanted to create a modern look and feel for SR1 to keep up with competitors.
• This new application was supposed to be more straightforward and easier to use. As a UX team we faced a big problem that is common to the industry.
• The company did not want us to focus on doing research with customers at the stage that I was brought into the project.
• We were told to crank out wireframes and designs for engineers to build the application as quickly as possible.
• Then we faced a switch in engineering team and they switched the tech stack they were using.
• We had to start over with a new team on how to hand off designs and had to get them up to speed with our established design system.

Empathize

• I learned about what users were experiencing when using the original application. I used it everyday and worked through flows and features.
• I asked the customer success team that worked with clients everyday what the pain points were for users.
• I wanted to know what they were having a hard time with and what they wanted from the application.
• I learned that the users I would be designing for were power users who have used the application on a daily basis for years.

Design

• This was the most difficult part of the process because I knew nothing about music royalties.