Client Name: ThinkMusik

Industry: E-learning & Music Education

Objective: Create a unified music education ecosystem that connects lessons, practice tracking, and career opportunities, addressing the fragmented experience musicians face with expensive lessons and disconnected tools.

Scope: Multi-platform design (responsive website, mobile app, student web app, admin dashboard), user research, design system creation, and usability testing.

Duration: 2 months (2022)

I led the design for ThinkMusik, an e-learning platform that connects music lessons, practice, and gig opportunities in one place. Working with another designer for 2 months, I owned the product strategy, design system, and the majority of the interface design, while my co-designer supported with additional screens and asset production. I drove the process from stakeholder workshops to validated prototypes across four platforms.

Musicians were juggling expensive private lessons ($50-200/hour), scattered practice tools, and separate job-hunting platforms. Through interviews with 40+ learners, parents, and instructors, plus competitive analysis of GuitarTricks, Pickup Music, and JTC Guitar, we found that existing platforms had solid content but lacked community features and career connections, key gaps we could address.

I designed a unified ecosystem from scratch with no existing design system. The challenge was building something scalable in a compressed timeline, so I prioritized creating a flexible component library and clear information architecture that could serve both beginners learning their first chord and advanced players tracking complex progress.

I split the experience across platforms strategically: mobile app for daily practice habits with gamification (streaks, badges), web platform for deeper learning sessions, and admin interface for content management. Each platform served a specific user need while maintaining design consistency.

Given the 2-month constraint, I focused the MVP on learners and platform management, while mapping out future instructor dashboards and employer tools to ensure our architecture could scale. This meant making tough calls about what to validate now versus design for later.

Through usability testing with 12 participants, structured learning paths reduced task completion time by 35% compared to our initial wireframes, and gamification features showed strong engagement signals with 9/12 testers saying they'd use the app daily based on those features alone.

Currently in final development, approaching launch. The design system and product architecture are built to support ThinkMusik's vision of connecting music education with community and career opportunities, addressing a market gap we validated through research.

Designing four interconnected platforms in 2 months taught me to ruthlessly prioritize. Not every feature needed to be perfect for MVP, some just needed to be architected correctly for future iteration. The key was building a foundation that wouldn't break as the product scaled.