UX/UI design, product development
Riffer
A complete, end-to-end app design process for a concept app built for musicians: from information architecture to a working, clickable prototype.
Client
Year
Services
Industry
Technology
Riffer is a self-initiated concept project. The goal wasn't to fulfill a client brief, but to show what an app design process looks like at FDS, from research to a functional prototype, at a depth that client NDAs and deadlines rarely allow us to show publicly.
The idea came from several musician friends in our own circle. They said they regularly run into trouble booking a shared rehearsal room or studio, and there aren't many active communities that make it simple.
Discovery & strategy
01
Competitor analysis
Of the competitors on the market, we looked closely at the Vampr app. Matching with other musicians worked well, but the actual interaction, organizing a rehearsal together, ran into trouble. None of the major competing apps had a working booking feature, even though that's exactly what would solve musicians' real, everyday problem.
02
The positioning
That insight set Riffer's main direction: the app would provide verified venues that could list their availability and take direct bookings. Not another matching app, but the piece that's missing after the matching.
03
Information architecture
The app's structure covers the full path from sign-up to actually playing music together: discovering musicians and venues by instrument, genre, and availability, forming and managing a band, booking a rehearsal room with payment, and an option for a live online rehearsal mirrored to a TV. During the IA phase, we also deliberately documented the smaller features and directions we left out of the first version, marked in the plan so the omission reads as a decision, not missing work.
Design approach
01
From research to design
The visual and functional decisions centered on making sure the app didn't stop at matching, the gap identified in Vampr. Musician profiles use instrument and genre tags plus direct messaging to help with discovery, but every profile leads somewhere next: starting a band, organizing a rehearsal, or booking a venue.
02
Verified venues and trust
Venue profiles (rehearsal rooms, studios) show photos, pricing, and real availability, with a "Book now" button. That responds directly to what the research identified: booking reliability was the missing link, not finding musicians.
03
Band Hub as the coordination center
After forming a band, the Band Hub brings members, the rehearsal schedule, and starting a live session together in one place. That solves the problem of coordinating a band, who's free, when to rehearse, where, which usually gets scattered across chat apps and paper.
04
Booking and payment in one flow
Rehearsal room booking closes with a calendar view, time slot selection, and a built-in payment step through to booking confirmation. The goal was for the booking to happen inside the app without interruption, not require a separate phone call or email.
05
Visual language
The visual direction aimed to speak to young musicians by blending a modern feel with a more analog one. The dark background and vibrant lime carry the modern, energetic character, while the imagery brings in a more analog, less polished mood. That keeps the app from reading as purely a tech product or a purely nostalgic music community.
Development
01
Prototype
We turned the design system into a functional, code-based prototype using Figma Make: not just a clickable mockup, but an actually interactive, testable interface that carries the full main path, from sign-up through onboarding, discovering musicians and forming a band, to booking a rehearsal room and the live room.
02
Open question
The biggest unresolved design question is the livestream feature. Real-time audio and video for an online rehearsal is a serious latency and audio-quality challenge, one that would need significantly more engineering depth and investment than the current concept covers.
Results
Riffer documents a full design process that starts from a real user problem: actual difficulties musician friends had booking rehearsal spaces. That fed into a competitor analysis, which identified the market gap, matching works, booking doesn't, and that insight directly shaped the information architecture and design decisions, from venue profiles through the Band Hub to the payment flow. The project reached a working, code-based prototype that carries the entire user journey.
Total turnaround time
4 weeks
Full user journey
21 screens
End-to-end project planning
Done
