Designing the Splice Skills MVP

> Background

Learning how to make music is really hard. We learned from user research that there are roadblocks for producers every step of the way ranging from a lack of musical and technical skills, and no clear direction on how to progress.

Splice has created enough brand equity in the music production space that we believe we have the ability to create a trusted platform for learning music production.

We’d offer high-quality, digestible videos on key topics taught by expert instructors who are producers themselves and downloadable materials that are easily accessible through our marketplace. This new platform was called Skills.

> Challenges

This was a brand new team at Splice. We were small, scrappy, and had limited resources in bringing the idea to life. Additionally, Skills was a part of a company-wide initiative to launch a set of offerings under our new subscription plans and the goal was to launch them all at the same time. Needless to say, we were under a lot of pressure to make this happen.

With both of these challenges in mind, I wanted to make sure we leveraged as many existing design system components as we could to build out the experience in order to reduce engineering complexity and time.

> Process

This was my first project at Splice. Since I came into the project after it was well underway, my focus was spent refining and delivering designs of the core experience, most of which were started by another designer. Nevertheless, I took the torch and explored each screen from the ground up.

> Result

For this project, I designed over 5 key screens in the overall Skills experience and created 8 new design components to support the experience. I also identified and designed a new screen to support the work of our XFN content team.

> Iterations

After launch, I continued to iterate on the core video experience in order to improve and optimize how our users find and consume content. This meant rethinking our video cards and the video page to ensure users were able to quickly find the content they wanted and be able to easily watch tutorials while practicing their craft at the same time.