Upload
Upload is one of the core experiences at SoundCloud. The current Upload flow in production is extremely outdated and was last updated in 2014. The redesign of the Upload flow aimed to update the UX to modern best practices, simplify the information hierarchy, and educate creators on how to get their track heard to ultimately increase uploads on SoundCloud.
Duration: 1 year, 8 months
Team: Bri Glass (Project Manager), Stephen Blake (Design manager), Tommy Barth (Engineering manager)
Role: Competitive analysis, internal audits, UX research, UI/UX design, prototyping, Figma components, copywriting
Problem Area
The Upload flow hasn’t been updated since 2015. Not only is the UI/UX extremely outdated, but the information hierarchy and lack of education makes the upload process much more complex than it needs to be. Through various previous UX research sessions a few core issues were identified:
Amateur creators expressed their confusion around the more advanced tabs, such as, Metadata and Monetization, and Permissions. They mentioned that they usually always skip those tabs.
Many creators didn’t understand the difference between genre vs. tags and description vs. caption.
Overall, many users did not complete fields that could help them get more listens and engagement.
How might we create an educational and streamlined Upload flow to empower creators to upload more and get more engagements on their uploaded tracks?
Existing Design
The current state of the Upload flow in production.
Internal Audit & Areas of Opportunity
I began to audit the existing experience and synthesized the following areas of opportunity:
General UX & IA concerns and issues captured from research for each tab
(Basic Info, Meta Data, Monetization, and Permissions)Navigation
Information hierarchy
Defining what a “quality track” means
Defining the difference between genres vs. tags & caption vs. description
Education
Iterations / Concepting
We used what we learned from the internal audit, competitive analysis, and existing company UXR to inform our design decisions. We went through many different iterations of the designs and underwent extensive design reviews with our EPD teams.
