Leep - Music collaboration platform
Overview
Problem
After an initial beta test, the founders of Leep Audio found that users weren't hooked on their product. While the core feature was well-received, the rest of the platform lacked the polish and identity to keep users coming back.
Solution
Interviews with the founders and potential users shaped a clear product direction: a platform that facilitates a more personal kind of collaboration while fan interaction generates actionable insights for artists serious about growth. From there, we defined the features that would give Leep its identity across the core pages: remix competitions, geo-based music exploration and an analytics layer.
Details
Role: UX Designer in a Design team of 3
Timeframe: 80 hours
My responsibilities: Project management, early wireframing, prototyping
Tools: Figma, FigJam, Figma Make, Google Workspace, Fireflies AI, Claude AI, NotebookLM
Research
A compelling core concept isn't enough
Leep is a music collaboration platform where artists can remix snippets of each other's work as a springboard for deeper creative partnerships. Show, don't tell. But the initial beta test showed this concept alone wasn't enough.
The feature resonated, but the platform lacked the engaging, insightful, and professional polish needed to truly empower artists to grow their audience and keep them coming back.
The founders brought us in to rethink
the experience from the ground up
Across four core pages, the issues were clear: artists lacked deep insight in their work’s reception, collaboration felt clunky and discovery failed to excite.
As a team of three, I led project management and mid-fidelity design, keeping the team anchored in user research before moving to solutions, and ensuring our work remained cohesive across pages rather than isolated by them.
Early interviews revealed a disconnect
between founders and users
We spoke with the Leep team, music lovers, and emerging artists at different stages of their careers. The founders came in with a clear technical vision for remix functionality and had done extensive research into monetization.
But users were more concerned
with social trust
While core features like groups, song-collaboration and demo-remixes resonated, concerns emerged.
Sharing stems with strangers felt vulnerable, raising viable questions around trust and creative ownership.
Users want profiles that tell their story (skill level, style, influences), and can double as a professional press kit.
A common frustration in music discovery platforms in that they always surface what you already know, lacking genuine musical connection
Highly contested space where most fail
Our competitive analysis painted a clear picture: the graveyard of music platforms is large.
A common thread in these platforms was a lack of authenticity. Profiles without creative history feel shallow, but music without personality fails to build trust or sustain engagement.
What keeps users returning is depth.
Taking inspiration from Github's collaboration graph, we explored how surfacing a musician's creative journey through analytics could strengthen both engagement and profile identity, making activity itself a form of storytelling.
Ideation
User flow 01: Find an artist that you feel you’d get along with, and request to collaborate on one of their tracks.
User flow 02: You shared an unfinished song hoping to receive actionable feedback and suggestions. Consult these analytics.
Go to full-sized user flows ↗
Features that give Leep its identity
across the core pages
Early wireframes. The Discovery page presents many
entryways into the platform's content.
The Globe: a geo-based music explorer that creates a novel way to discover new music while doubling as a visualisation of listener stats in the analytics hub.
Remix competitions that create recurring opportunities for engagement, giving new users a low-barrier way in.
Making profiles more meaningful
A revised profile structure tells the story of the person behind the music while doubling as a professional press kit. We structured the profile around two tabs, each with a distinct intent:
An About tab that gives human context beyond the music.
(Early wireframes)
A Music & Collaborations tab designed for what fellow
musicians want to know before deciding to work together.
(Early wireframes)
A profile with depth turns a casual listener into an invested one.
Involving fans in the collaboration
Fan interaction is visualised directly on a track's waveform,
creating a living record of how and when a track resonates.
(Early wireframes)
Fan-generated metrics generate actionable insights for artists serious about growth, while also serving as a signal of credibility to potential collaborators.
These insights don't just inform, they actively drive discovery.
(Early wireframes)
A spike in Canadian listeners, for example, becomes an invitation to connect with local artists, turning data into meaningful creative opportunity.
Evaluative research
Usability tests revealed excitement for
the content, but clarity-issues in structure
Users responded well to the variety of content entry points, but navigation caused friction. The line between personal tracks and collaborations felt blurry, leaving users unsure where to look.
We reduced the complexity of comment visualisation by
hiding comments until they're activated and moving remix
requests to the top of the waveform.
Insight-driven discovery, while compelling in concept, felt crowded and needed restructuring so users could clearly understand where suggestions were coming from, particularly for first-time users.
To reduce complexity, artists' track were moved to a third tab and we lowered the amount of metrics in profile pages.
On-platform remixing, meanwhile, showed little traction and was deprioritised as a result.
Removing remix options allowed us to simplify the process for requesting stems to a single modal
Retrospective
Looking back, two directions
feel worth exploring further
While original scope boundaries were set at the start and these have been met, I feel like we're just getting started with introducing the more complex features.
Fan involvement could go deeper. Giving fans a role in taking collaborations to social media and sharing their contribution on the track page, creating mutual exposure for both artist and platform.
And with profiles now functioning as a professional press kit, the step toward a musician-specific link hub for social media profiles isn't a large one: a natural evolution that could meaningfully extend Leep's value beyond the platform itself.
d-(^_^)z
Designed in Figma, built in Framer.
3D models made with Polycam. Based in Ghent.