WAVFORM · 2025
ROLE
Founder
Product Designer
TIMELINE
Apr 2024 – Jan 2026
TEAM
Product Designer
Engineer
TOOLS
Figma
After Effects
OVERVIEW
People love tracking and sharing their hobbies – runs on Strava, restaurants on Beli, films on Letterboxd. But with 1.1 billion people streaming music, there was no user-friendly equivalent for listening. That gap was the starting point for Wavform.
SOLUTION
The only music tracking app that connects right to your Spotify.
Write reviews and share your thoughts on albums/songs.
Track your listening habits with detailed stats.
IMPACT
#134
ranked on the iOS App Store music category charts.
1,500+
total users in 2 months post-launch.
22%
week 1 retention
EARLY FINDINGS
Existing options are clunky and not built for convenience. After talking to users (and from my own experience) speed is everything. If it's not instant, it can't happen because unlike a restaurant or movie you're usually onto the next song or album in minutes. And while Twitter and Reddit are where fans naturally share their thoughts, they weren't built strictly for it, making genuine music takes hard to find.
PAIN POINTS
Existing tools aren't built for mobile
No quick way to leave a review
Music blogs offer quality, not community
KEY INSIGHT
MARKET LANDSCAPE
Pitchfork (Traditional Music Blogs)
Music blogs have been around forever and are easy to find, but you’re getting one person’s take. Monthly traffic is down 48.3% across the three biggest blogs showing that audiences are moving on, and readers increasingly disagree with the singular critical voice. Coverage is also limited to whatever a writer chose to review, so if no one wrote about it, it doesn’t exist on the platform.
AOTY/RYM
Allows for user-written reviews and functions more like a social network, but the web-only experience creates too much friction for casual users.
Musicboard
The closest competitor. Uses streaming service data for an unlimited database and tracks personal analytics but no connection to the users library for logging. Built by a solo developer back in 2020 who has since been transparent about shifting his focus elsewhere, leaving the platform down for weeks at a time and filled with bots.
DESIGN PROCESS
I had already designed a rough v1 of the app because we needed to get the app submitted for our Spotify integration application, so the goal was to take this idea and develop it into a product ready for market.
FEATURES
Homepage
Probably the biggest departure from v1 due to horizontal scrolling categories becoming a vertical infinite scroll. This gave written reviews the real estate they deserve, while ratings live in a horizontal strip at the top, similar to an Instagram Stories layout. The redesign also solved a retention problem, over 50% of users weren't following anyone, so we introduced an Everyone tab, giving new users content to browse from day one regardless of who they follow.
Currently Listening To
The core design challenge was making rating feel effortless. In v1, the Now Playing card only lived on the homepage. So if you were anywhere else in the app, you had to navigate back just to leave a rating. The fix was simple: move it into the navigation bar, so no matter where you are, you're always one tap away from rating whatever's playing.
User Profile
The goal here wasn't to just build something functional, but to turn it into a canvas. Something users would actually want to share, so the redesign focused on hierarchy and giving people a better way to showcase their favorites and recent activity.
FINAL DESIGNS
