Optimizing music discovery in SoundCloud’s Mobile App

SoundCloud’s mobile search experience makes it difficult for users to quickly find and filter content, leading to friction in discovery and navigation.

I redesigned the end-to-end search experience to improve usability, clarity, and interaction flow.

In this project I set out to see if a redesigned search experience could help users discover music they like with less time and less friction.

My Role

User Research

UX Design

UI Design

Prototype Developer

Deliverables

Heuristic Audit

User Interviews

Low-Fidelity Frames

Live Prototype

Tool Stack

FigJam

Figma

ChatGPT

Claude

VS Code

GitHub

Vercel

First, I identified the functional gaps for search between the mobile and web products through a heuristic audit

I then conducted user interviews to discover what they search for, what filters matter, and where mobile fails them the most

"I usually find music when I search through 'related tracks' of a song I like"

Isabelle, 28 years old

"I typically sort the search by newness and relevance to my search"

Martin, 32 years old

How might we make SoundCloud’s mobile search a reliable tool for users trying to source music on the go?

Although my audit surfaced a long list of possible improvements, I decided to focus on adding filters to mobile search. This solution felt like the most natural starting point — users already understand filtering from the web experience, and Jakob's Law tells us people prefer interfaces that work the way they already expect.

Ideas I had to table for now:

Search Through Tagging

As of now - tagging is a task done by artists and creators and can sometimes not be the most straightforward or obvious depiction of what the song’s ID is through genre or vibe.

Search through Beats Per Minute

I imagine that soon enough, SoundCloud could integrate a particular AI that implements BPM matching to songs and could be accomplished using the right team (aka not me, I’ll stick with this project for right now).

I started with low-fidelity frames in Figma, designing search screens with dropdown menus to filter by relevance and by time.

To validate my design decisions, I built a live prototype using React and Vite, allowing me to test interactions in a realistic environment and ensure feasibility for production.

In VSCode, I prompted the Chat to help me make minor changes to the original design, simplifying it to remain consistent with SoundClouds current UI.

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View Live Prototype

Before

After

I believe this change meaningfully improves the mobile search experience. Enhanced search capabilities on mobile could have real potential to boost premium membership conversion.

I'd love to revisit the tabled ideas down the road and explore how I'd approach designing them. What do you think — would this change how you search on SoundCloud?

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Optimizing music discovery in SoundCloud’s Mobile App

"I usually find music when I search through 'related tracks' of a song I like"

"I typically sort the search by newness and relevance to my search"

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