Soundstripe
Soundstripe is a platform that simplifies legal access to stock music, video, and sound effects for content creators, ensuring their projects are safe for distribution.
During my two years at Soundstripe, I helped transform the product from its original founder-designed version into a modern, profitable content licensing platform. I led all design efforts, launching new features, guiding the development of the design system, and strengthening the role of design within the organization.
Search & discovery
The most impactful design initiative I led at Soundstripe was overhauling how users find content on the platform. This was a major pain point for users and a key factor in customer churn, but it took persistence from me and a small, like-minded product group to push the project forward.
Once the project got the green light, our team identified the core UX issues with our search tools, rapidly prototyped and tested several solutions, and rolled out the new design in a systematic way. The result was a significant improvement in time-to-value, a drop in the search page’s abandonment rate, and consistently positive feedback from customers.
Of all the changes we made, the ability to search by similar songs became the most popular. Many creators wanted to find music similar to what they had used before, and this feature provided a quick and easy way to do that.
Responsive enhancements
Before launching its iOS and Android apps, Soundstripe received a large portion of its web traffic from mobile devices. Before I joined, this traffic was consistently dropping off early in the visit, and not leading to much interaction. I led the effort to turn this around by adopting a mobile-first approach, and ensuring that our web components were not only responsive but also fully optimized for each device type.
Project organization
We frequently heard from customers that managing their work across projects was challenging. They wanted a way to reference past work, whether to reuse a successful song or avoid repeating an asset in a similar project.
To address this, we built Projects, a feature that enabled creators to build and maintain a project archive, while also giving them a way to quickly share ideas with their clients and partners. It quickly became popular among our most active users and helped reposition Soundstripe as an essential workflow tool, rather than just a content search engine.
Subscription flow
The subscription flow I inherited was outdated, overly complex, and didn’t effectively communicate the value of a Soundstripe subscription. We overhauled the entire process, simplifying the plan structure and making sign-up smoother. Additionally, we developed internal tools that allowed non-engineering team members to easily modify plan features, adjust pricing, and toggle promotional content as needed.
Launching stock video
I initially joined Soundstripe to help launch their stock video product. Video, alongside their music and SFX offerings, would give them the content needed to be a one-stop-shop for most production needs, and be a huge differentiator from other stock music services.
I led the design and development of all video-related updates, following the established UX wherever I could, but also making necessary considerations for Soundstripe's first visual content type.
