SoundLedger

ROLE

Sole Product Designer

TIMELINE

4 months

RESPONSIBILITIES

UX Research, Information Architecture, Design System, Visual Design, Prototyping

TEAM

Principal Engineer, Founder, Stakeholders

Confidentiality Notice

To comply with a non-disclosure agreement, certain details in this case study have been modified. Company names, artist names, account information, and numerical data have been changed or anonymized. The design work, process, and strategic decisions presented accurately reflect my contributions to the project.

THE CHALLENGE

Key Problems

Fragmented Experience

Inconsistent navigation, layouts, and visual patterns created friction across the platform.

Difficult Information Discovery

Finding projects, reports, and financial data required too many clicks and relied on limited search and filtering tools.

Complex Data Visualization

Users struggled to interpret royalty and performance data due to unclear reporting and limited context.

Inefficient Reporting Workflows

Lack of customization, reusable templates, and export flexibility slowed down day-to-day tasks.

DISCOVERY

Understanding the Business

To understand SoundLedger's business model, user workflows, and platform architecture, I facilitated discovery workshops with the principal engineer and stakeholders. These sessions helped uncover pain points, align on terminology, and identify opportunities for improvement across the product experience.

Methods

• Facilitated stakeholder workshops in Miro to surface user problems, align on priorities, and capture requirements
• Mapped the existing site structure to understand the dashboard ecosystem and pinpoint where to simplify
• Ran competitive analysis of other record labels and music-industry sites to benchmark the redesign

One of the core architectural changes I proposed centered on how projects were accessed. A project is a grouping of a producer's work, governed by an agreement, with its own details spanning agreement terms, reporting, tracks, and earnings. In the original structure, that information lived behind a single entry point (the Projects page) which meant a user browsing an artist's catalog had no path to the financial data tied to it. I consolidated these details into a single Project Detail Page and gave it two routes: one from Projects, and a new one from Discography. This connected an artist's music catalog directly to its financial information, so users could move from what was released to how it's performing without leaving the context they started in.

DESIGN STRATEGY 

What Drove the Redesign

Focus on Business Manager Workflows

Through workshops and stakeholder conversations, it became clear that business managers were the platform's most frequent users. The redesign prioritized reporting, financial tracking, and export workflows that supported their day-to-day responsibilities.

Simplify Information Architecture

Site mapping revealed inconsistencies in navigation and hierarchy, leading to a restructuring of the platform's organization and page layouts.

Modernize the Visual Language

Competitive analysis highlighted opportunities to improve visual consistency and data presentation.

Improve Reporting & Transparency

Research uncovered a need for clearer reporting, more context around financial data, and stronger self-service capabilities.

DESIGN SYSTEM 

A System Built for Financial Data

To create a more cohesive and scalable product experience, I established a design system that unified visual styles, standardized components, and improved the presentation of complex financial data. 

• Expanded the existing brand palette and introduced a more modern visual style.

• Created reusable components to ensure consistency across dashboards, reports, and workflows.

• Improved readability with a new typography system and hierarchy using Poppins

• Designed charts and data visualizations inspired by financial platforms to make royalty data more actionable.
  

KEY FEATURE 

Home Dashboard

The original homepage gave users a lot of data but little sense of what was happening in the present moment. A user couldn’t see which pay period they were currently in, when money was arriving, or what payments had already been received. “Top earning tracks” took up too much visual real estate, and the artist avatar was oversized, not giving any indication that it was interactive. The dashboard landing experience was not giving users real time information upfront, regarding their income. 

The central theme of the redesign was orientation, giving users an immediate read on their current state the moment they land. I added a personal touch at the top, greeting the user by name alongside the current date, which grounds the page in the present. The most important addition was the top module, showing live earnings for the current period next to a reporting status that tracks how many statements are expected, in progress, and received. 

KEY FEATURE 

Earnings Page

The Earnings page gives users a detailed breakdown by pay period showing what's earning, how much, and where it's coming from. The original page offered only a flat summary with no visual hierarchy, and it was retrospective, telling users what had already happened with no signal about accruing balances or upcoming recoupments.

The redesign leads with a clear "Total Payable" figure and breaks the numbers down into statement earnings, unrecouped accounts, and accruals. Data visualization does the heavy lifting: a Statement Earnings module charts revenue by label, consumption method, and digital service provider, while a Historical Insights line graph tracks earnings across pay periods over time. Quick-view modules surface top earning tracks and projects, each with a CTA routing users into the related Discography and Projects sections. A "Projects to Watch For" section adds a forward-looking layer, flagging the largest accrued balances and which projects are expected to recoup soon.

KEY FEATURE 

Discography & Project Pages

Discography and Projects present the same catalog through two different lenses. Discography is the consumer-facing view: a high-level, sortable list of the entire catalog broken down by individual track, with release date, earnings, and streams at a glance. Projects is the music-industry view: the catalog organized into bodies of work, each governed by a contractual agreement, presented as visual tiles that surface agreement status alongside quick-read royalty and advance figures. 

The original Projects page collapsed all of this into a single dense data table. Every row was equal weight in a wall of text, so nothing was scannable and the filter UI was confusing. This new version kept the same data and filtering logic, but moved projects into visual, card-based tiles, so a user can see at a glance which projects are earning, which are missing agreements, and where the money sits. This turns a spreadsheet-like table into something a business manager can actually scan and act on.

KEY FEATURE 

Reporting Page

The Reporting page gives users visibility into a process that was previously invisible to them. Statements arrive from labels, and SoundLedger's internal admin team publishes them for the user. In the old design, users had no way of knowing where in that pipeline anything stood. There was information on a granular level for each statement, but there was no overall summary, or empty state explaining when nothing has arrived yet.

The redesign opens it up with a status tracker at the top of the page that maps the full reporting states of the timeline: start of period, end of period, statements incoming, reporting due. It also shows exactly where the current period sits, how many statements are ready, expected, and received. When statements are coming in, a "Statements by Label Account" view uses color-coded bars to show at a glance which are processing versus published. And because reporting is cyclical, the page handles the in-between moment, when a period has just closed but no statements have arrived yet. A clear empty state tells the user there's nothing to show yet and points them to previous periods, rather than leaving them in a dead end. 

OUTCOME

What Shipped and What I Learned

My contract ended before the redesign reached users at scale, so I don't have post-launch metrics. However, the  feedback throughout reviews was consistently positive, especially around what the redesign set out to fix. Now users can finally land on the platform and immediately grasp the state of their earnings and reporting instead of looking at a confusing interface. By handoff I'd delivered a ground-up design system, a revised site architecture, and six redesigned core surfaces. 

Two threads remain scoped but unfinished: I mapped the new project detail page in the site map but didn't design the page itself. Also, my work focused entirely on the user-facing side, leaving the SoundLedger internal admin experience, where statements are received and published, as the other half of the system I'd want to take on next.

The biggest lesson was that financial UX lives in the small details. When a product is about people's money, communicating each step is important to ensure confidence and trust. I also learned about the inner workings and business mechanics of the music industry, which includes how producers get paid, how agreements govern earnings, and how statements flow from labels through to recoupment. 

Working as the sole designer alongside a single principal engineer was a genuinely good collaboration. Designing within a Bootstrap-aligned system taught me to make choices that were buildable and scalable, so that all the components can grow as this dashboard evolves.