8tracks: First-Time User Experience
Rebuilt the first-time experience for a beloved music platform to learn user taste faster and feed better playlist recommendations from day one.
Overview
The 8tracks first-time experience was the moment a new listener either fell for the product or drifted away. Over roughly three months, I led a redesign of the FTUX across iOS, Android, and web, with a clear job to do: engage new users immediately and capture enough taste signal to power more relevant playlist recommendations, which in turn supports retention.
The challenge
A first run has to earn attention in seconds while quietly doing real work: reading a person's taste well enough to make the next recommendation feel personal. Too much friction and people bail; too little signal and the recommendations fall flat. Finding that balance across three platforms was the puzzle.
What I did
I started from a shared team vision and treated it as a hypothesis rather than a spec. We validated and refined it with qualitative research, usability testing, and A/B testing along the way, so the shipped design was earned by evidence, not opinion. Once the interaction model held up, I partnered with our visual designer to bring it to a polished finish, then worked closely with engineering to build the updated experience consistently across platforms.
Outcome
The redesigned first run shipped across iOS, Android, and web in Spring 2016. Because the team vision was treated as a hypothesis rather than a spec, every part of the flow that survived to launch had first been through qualitative research, usability testing, or an A/B test. The lesson that stayed with me was about restraint: a first run earns the right to ask for taste signal by giving something back immediately, and the fastest way to lose a new listener is to make the product feel like a form.
