My role at Sony Music was a true hybrid, with a heavy reliance on engineering. I was responsible not only for designing the user interface and experience but also for working directly with the engineering team to build and implement the solutions, ensuring that our design vision was technically sound and performant.
The challenge
The world of music royalties is incredibly complex. Every artist's contract is unique, making it a significant challenge to create a generalized user flow that felt intuitive. Furthermore, the application needed to support multiple languages, currencies, and location-specific business rules. The core challenge was to design and build a single, responsive platform that could present this highly complex financial data in a simple, clear, and reliable way for a diverse, international user base.
My role
My position let me own the user experience from initial concept through to implementation, keeping design and engineering tightly connected.
I started by deconstructing the existing application's information architecture and workflows, then led design workshops with the finance team and key stakeholders to explore different concepts. We developed hypotheses and used sample data based on artist tenure to create viable, generalised user flows.
I synthesised our findings into concrete design iterations, broke them into release candidates, and validated them through testing with mock data, geolocation testing, and localisation inputs to check accuracy and usability across our target markets.
Once designs were validated, I worked hands-on with the engineering team to build the release candidates. My focus was on responsive interfaces that worked well across devices and on performance tuning for the complex data visualisations.
I was also deeply involved in solving core technical challenges: multilingual support, geolocation features (refined over multiple iterations), and currency conversions that needed the decimal precision artists expected.
Outcomes
We shipped a responsive web app that gave artists and producers a clear, reliable way to track their global earnings. The app handled multilingual support, geolocation, and complex financial data presentation, problems that had plagued the previous system.
Having one person across both design and engineering removed a lot of the usual friction. Decisions about what was technically feasible happened in real time rather than through handoff documents. Focusing on the precision of financial data and validating designs with users meant artists could actually trust what they were seeing.
Owning the process end to end meant every technical decision could be weighed against the user experience, which made a real difference for a data-heavy application like this.