CNTNDR

Project Overview
CNTNDR is a startup dedicated to providing ambitious music creators a compelling stage to battle and showcase their talent. Initially available as a web-based platform, CNTNDR recognized the opportunity to expand into a mobile experience, tapping into the exciting nature of music videos and live performances. By combining competition with community, CNTNDR strives to become the premier destination where emerging artists can gain recognition, connect with niche audiences, and thrive in a creative environment. The end goal: to create a sleek, user-centric mobile application that excites artists and listeners while building a space for discovery, competition, and collaboration.

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Problem Space
We aimed to balance creators’ needs to showcase their craft and find industry connections with listeners’ desires to discover fresh talent and enjoy authentic performances. By addressing these pain points, CNTNDR can position itself as the flagship for social music competitions and catalyze the growth of emerging artists in a dynamic online environment. Our client is asking us to create an entertaining and accessible music battle experience that can fit on a smartphone.

CNTNDR challenged our team to address the key problem statement:

How might we design a mobile application experience for CNTNDR that encourages music creators from diverse backgrounds to showcase their talents, compete, and discover new opportunities, while fostering a sense of community and visibility for emerging artists?

Given that CNTNDR’s user base spans everything from first-time creators to established professionals across a variety of musical genres, my team was tasked with building platform that celebrates diverse talent while sustaining social connections and healthy competition. As the Project Manager, I supervised the design process—coordinating with our consultants, maintaining clear communication with CNTNDR's team, and ensuring that all deliverables were aligned with the company’s vision for a flagship ecosystem.

Final Product‍
Building on our mid-fidelity prototypes, we refined CNTNDR’s core user flows—Search, Battle, and Home—to craft a polished interface rooted in the platform’s design system. By emphasizing genre visibility and clear navigation patterns, we aimed to deliver a seamless, engaging experience that supports both creators and listeners.
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Home Page
One of the main challenges identified during user research was how to effectively surface niche music battles that cater to each individual’s musical tastes. Many listeners expressed difficulty finding content aligned with their genres of interest in other platforms, leading to reduced engagement. In response, we designed a sleek, dark UI—inspired by familiar short-form video apps—to create an intuitive, visually appealing landing experience.A standout feature of the Home Page is the Recommended Battles carousel, which algorithmically curates battles tailored to each user’s listening preferences. This not only addresses the pain point of content discovery but also serves to continuously engage listeners with fresh, relevant music. Additionally, the home interface surfaces trending battles and upcoming events, ensuring that emerging creators receive optimal visibility and fans can quickly find captivating performances without being overwhelmed by unnecessary information.

Battle Page
Our research revealed two critical pain points when it came to hosting effective music battles: voting bias and subpar community interaction. To tackle these issues, we introduced a comment section on every battle page, enabling direct artist-listener engagement—a crucial element for fostering a supportive and interactive community.In terms of interface design, we kept the same sleek, dark UI for consistency while making strategic layout choices to minimize bias. Both contender profiles are displayed on the battle page to remind listeners that there are two videos to watch before voting. However, to avoid clutter, only one video plays on the screen at a time, preventing information overload and allowing each artist’s performance to receive undivided attention. Together, these decisions offer a more impartial environment: listeners can judge each artist’s video independently, and comments help artists gather feedback to refine their craft. This holistic approach not only streamlines navigation but also underpins CNTNDR’s commitment to fairness and community-building.

The Process

Research
Our initial focus was on two key audiences: music creators and music listeners. Creators ranged from hobbyists to aspiring professionals looking for new ways to showcase their work, whereas listeners were music enthusiasts who enjoy discovering fresh talent. The team conducted primary research through surveys, interviews, and focus group discussions. We sourced most of our participants from UC Berkeley students who either regularly produce music or are music listeners.

Primary Research Methods

1. Survey
‍Gather quantitative data on user preferences, pain points, and desires around music discovery and competition. A screener survey was distributed to a wide pool of participants, yielding over 60 responses. This provided a broad snapshot of how people currently engage with music platforms and what features might resonate most in a competitive environment.

2. Interviews
Dive deeper into creators’ and listeners’ personal experiences, uncovering motivations, challenges, and potential opportunities for a mobile music battle platform. We conducted 8 in-depth interviews with participants from both groups. For creators, we probed into competition vs. collaboration, monetization strategies, and discovery avenues. Listeners were asked about their music consumption habits and what could drive engagement in a competition-style format. The interviews allowed us to explore nuanced opinions, including unexpected pain points like copyright constraints.

3. Focus Group
Observe group dynamics and shared sentiments around emerging talent, community, and competition. A small focus group of 8 participants sparked open discussion, generating collective insights into how a competition-driven platform might fit into their current music discovery routines. While creators often required deeper, one-on-one conversations (hence the separate interviews), this format gave us broader context on listener preferences and social interactions within a music-focused community.

Key Findings & Takeaways
Creators saw competitions as a way to gain exposure but also expressed strong interest in collaboration features for networking and community-building.
Discovery & Visibility: Listeners were drawn to fresh content and behind-the-scenes views of emerging artists, stressing the importance of surfacing new talent in a user-friendly way.
‍Barriers: Some creators struggled to produce music consistently due to academic commitments, limiting how frequently they engage with competitive platforms.
‍Engagement Drivers: Both creators and listeners emphasized that intuitive design, exciting visuals, and transparent rules are critical to fostering trust and sustained participation.

Synthesizing The Research
This phase of the project involved synthesizing our research findings into actionable insights. By analyzing competitor platforms, mapping out user behaviors and motivations, and consolidating feedback from surveys, interviews, and focus groups, we built a stronger understanding of how to shape CNTNDR’s mobile experience for both creators and listeners.

Affinity Mapping
Using the wealth of data from surveys, interviews, and focus groups, we created affinity maps to cluster common themes and user pain points. This process helped us distill user sentiments around creative collaboration, competition, and community-building into coherent groups, making it easier to prioritize features and address the most pressing user needs.

User Personas
After mapping out recurring user behaviors and motivations, we developed two primary personas—one for music creators and another for music listeners to uncover a deeper understanding of their behaviors pain points.

Music Creator

Music Listener

Journey Maps
We complemented these personas with journey maps illustrating how each group would interact with CNTNDR’s features. This visualization highlighted touch points such as competition discovery, content sharing, and community interactions, allowing us to ensure a seamless, rewarding user flow.

Competitive Analysis
We examined popular music and social platforms frequently mentioned by our research participants to identify which features and design elements resonate with users—and which ones fall short. Our team noted essential functionalities such as streamlined onboarding, niche-tailored discovery algorithms, and transparent feedback mechanisms. These competitive insights guided us in pinpointing the best practices to adopt in CNTNDR, as well as pitfalls to avoid.

Key Insights
These insights form the bedrock for our design approach. We faced challenges in narrowing our scope to these top three themes, given the wealth of user opinions. However, focusing on the essentials ensures that CNTNDR’s core offering—music competitions that foster growth, connection, and discovery—remains robust and user-centric.
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1. Niche Finding
Both creators and listeners want a creator-listener relationship based on their specific niche music tastes.
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2. Competition
Listeners and creators want an entertaining but fair competition experience that encourages growth.
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3. Interaction
Creators want a platform that promotes interaction to understand their fans' needs and helps them monetize in the future.

By integrating findings from our competitor analysis, affinity mapping, personas, and journey maps, we established a strong strategic direction for the CNTNDR mobile application. This clear, synthesized framework set the stage for our design and prototyping efforts to follow.

Ideation
Upon completing our insight statements, we presented our findings to the CNTNDR team and recommended a refined problem scope. Backed by comprehensive user research and synthesis, this revised scope zeroed in on three core objectives:
1. How might we help users easily find music and battles that correspond with their music tastes?
2. How might we implement a fair voting system that encourages artist growth?
3. How might we create an engaging community that fosters a positive artist-listener relationship?
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Brain Dumps
To begin generating ideas, our team conducted a series of “braindumps,” encouraging each member to propose bold, unconventional solutions that challenged existing norms. This approach allowed us to capture a wide range of possibilities—from novel voting gestures to innovative audience engagement features—without the constraints of feasibility or technical limitations.
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Low-Fidelity Prototypes
‍Once we selected our primary concepts, we created low-fidelity paper sketches to explore various layout options and user flows. This stage allowed us to rapidly test and iterate on design decisions—such as placement of the audience meter and the logic behind voting interactions—before moving on to more detailed visuals.

Mid-Fidelity Prototypes
With the initial sketches refined, our team developed mid-fidelity prototypes in Figma, further defining interface elements, color schemes, and navigation patterns. These mid-fis were crucial in verifying that our core ideas would function cohesively, aligning with both user expectations and the requirements set by CNTNDR’s business objectives.

Converging on Key Ideas
After collecting ideas, we evaluated them against our refined scope and user insights.
- Audience Meter: A real-time visual indicator of listener engagement during battles, ensuring artists receive immediate feedback and listeners feel part of the performance.
- Intuitive Voting Gestures: Simple, engaging ways for users to cast votes during head-to-head competitions, lowering the barrier to participation and creating a more interactive experience.
- Home Feed Orientation: A design focusing on artist exposure, ensuring that emerging talents can effectively showcase their niche and connect with the right listeners.

Reflections + Impact
Leading the CNTNDR project as a Project Manager was both a challenging and rewarding experience. The responsibility of overseeing each phase of the design process—while ensuring alignment with the client’s vision and our team’s objectives—required coordination, clear communication, and a strong focus on team morale. There were challenging moments; however, breaking down tasks into small manageable achievements and creating an environment where every team member could voice their ideas made the project much more achievable. This leadership role taught me the importance of uplifting each individual’s strengths, encouraging open dialogue, and remaining flexible in the face of unforeseen obstacles.

Looking back, one of my proudest accomplishments was seeing how effectively the team came together to navigate the complexities of user research, synthesis, and design iteration. By treating challenges as opportunities to learn and grow, we built trust that reflected positively in our final deliverable. If given more time, I would have loved to conduct rounds of user testing to further validate and refine our high-fidelity designs. Frequent user feedback is crucial not only for enhancing interface details but also for uncovering any needs or pain points we might have missed. Aside from growing in different aspects of design, I can confidently say our team developed a social dynamic through team bonding socials which contributed heavily to the work environment. So proud of my team!