Output Arcade 2.0
Music Software
Output Arcade 2.0
Music Software
Output Arcade 2.0
Music Software
Redesigning discovery, search, and navigation for a music production platform used by over 300,000 producers monthly — resulting in a 28% lift in paid conversion.
The Problem
High browse rate.
Low conversion.
Output had built its name on digital synthesizer software — one-time purchases, professional tools, a loyal producer base. Arcade was a different kind of bet: a subscription model with recurring revenue, ongoing content delivery, and a fundamentally different relationship with the user.
It launched strong. Early adoption validated the model. But over the following quarters, paid subscriptions started tapering — and pricing promotions weren't moving the needle. The business thesis was quietly eroding.
That pointed to a product problem, not a pricing one. We needed to understand what was breaking in the early user experience — what was driving cancellations, and why trial users weren't converting in the first place.
What The Data Showed
Research & Project Goals
Based on our user research methods of conducting 1:1 interviews with producers of our existing product and studio sit-ins. We discovered 3 distincted opportunities to streamline the creative process of music making and increase discoverability.
For every 23 samples a producer opened, they saved one. Users were exploring constantly, but almost nothing was landing.
1 in 6 sessions ended with no saved content at all. Users came, browsed, and left with nothing to show for it.
Nearly two-thirds of all searches ended without engaging a single result — a direct signal that results weren't trustworthy.
Average time to reach a first meaningful action. For a 1-week trial, that's too slow to convert.
What The Data Means
Key Insights
Discoverability
Arcades growing sample library wasn’t being discovered.
Lackluster Search
Global search and filtering were lacking, making it difficult for users to find sample they needed.
Confusing Navigation
Users were overwhelmed by UX navigation and did not know what was in their own library and what was available to download on Output.
Research & Project Goals
Based on our user research methods of conducting 1:1 interviews with producers of our existing product and studio sit-ins. We discovered 3 distincted opportunities to streamline the creative process of music making and increase discoverability.
Content Discovery Mismatch
The home feed was static and identical for all users, regardless of their behavior or taste. Producers weren't seeing content aligned with what they made — so they spent more time browsing than creating.
Producers Didn't Trust Search
Producers think in genre, mood, BPM, and instrument — but search relied on exact matches and non-standardized tags. "Percussion" and "percussive" were separate buckets, each returning a fraction of the library. With 63% abandonment, the tool wasn't trustworthy enough to act on.
A Rigid Browsing Experience
The product made you pick a category before entering content. Producers naturally think in non-linear ways — this mismatch introduced friction during exploration, and almost nothing was landing.
Opportunity
How might we reduce the time between discovery to first sound, while building a discovery-inclusive workflow producers can rely on?
How might we help users quickly discover and explore new music samples that aligns with their taste, especially as we release new lines each week?
Approach
Discovery Through Iteration
We tested the lighter lift first
Before committing to a full taxonomy rebuild, I tested the simpler fix: consolidating search and content browsing into a single unified view. The hypothesis was mine — producers were abandoning searches because results were scattered. Combine the views and they'd find what they need.
The metric didn't move.
Consolidation helped producers see more results in one place. But the results were still wrong. "Percussion" and "percussive" were still different buckets. The problem wasn't visibility — it was the underlying data. Producers weren't failing to find results. They were finding results that weren't trustworthy enough to act on.
The Problem Was Infrastructure, Not Surface
A cleaner UI couldn't fix inconsistent metadata. Any search improvement built on top of bad tagging would have been designing around the problem — not solving it.
Option 1 Made the Real Investment Possible
Re-tagging thousands of pieces of content is a significant ask — but a failed experiment is easier to pitch than a hypothesis. Option 1 gave us the evidence we needed to make the infrastructure case internally.
Approach
Content, with Context
Without fixing the underlying metadata, any surface improvements would just be designing around bad inputs.
Producers think in terms of mood, genre, BPM, instrument, and key — that's how they hear music. The product was organized around internal content hierarchy. Every search forced a translation between creative instinct and system structure. That translation is friction, and friction in a creative tool breaks flow.
The existing taxonomy was a mess
Every piece of content in Arcade had been tagged manually and inconsistently over years, with no standardized system. Tags were a flat, undifferentiated cloud — mood descriptors, genre labels, technique words, and instrument types all mixed together with no hierarchy and no shared vocabulary.
"Percussion" and "percussive" were separate tags returning different results. "Sound design," "texture," and "organic" described the same territory but were treated as distinct buckets. BPM, key, and instrument had no dedicated dimensions at all. Individual tags were returning a few hundred results from a library of thousands — not because the content wasn't there, but because the tagging system had splintered it into disconnected pools.
Fixing the taxonomy wasn't one of the solutions — it was the prerequisite for all the other solutions.
I organized the redesign around three place where the content surfaced — the only places that could actually move the conversion needle:
Letting the UI fade away
Simplify the IA so the structure matches how producers actually move. Shift cognitive load away from the interface.
Fix the foundation first
Standardize the entire content library. Without this, search is unreliable and discovery can't personalize. Everything else depends on it.
Build on clean signal
With structured metadata in place, make the home feed adaptive — algorithmic recommendations that actually work because the tags are now trustworthy.
Arcade 2.0
Navigation
In Arcade 1.0, a persistent sidebar created real cognitive overhead. Every session began with producers orienting themselves to the interface before they could think about music. There was also an operational cost: confusing navigation drove avoidable support tickets and required tutorial content just to explain the product.
We removed the sidebar and reorganized everything into three clear sections: Play, Browse, and Your Stuff. The structure is simple enough that users internalize it quickly — they recognize where things are without reading labels. We also unified the kit player and kit browser, which had been two separate views, into one.
Play, Browse, and Your Stuff
Three clear sections replacing a sidebar-driven structure. Simple enough to internalize on first use.
Removed Sidebar
Eliminated the persistent sidebar that required producers to orient before they could create. This also cut discovery-related support tickets significantly.
Unified the Kit Player and Browser
Previously two separate views — merged into one continuous experience. Less context switching between exploring and playing.
Arcade 2.0
Search & Taxonomy
Search was the heaviest lift — and the right place to start. Everything else depended on it. When search returns irrelevant results in a creative tool, it creates frustration and breaks trust. A producer who trusts the search tool is a producer willing to pay for it — and with clean tags underneath, the home feed could finally do something intelligent.
Global Search, Available Everywhere
We introduced a unified global search that works across the entire library — from kits and lines to individual samples. Users can now search from any screen, including within their personal libraries and Output's full catalog.
New Taxonomy
We built a structured tagging system from scratch with five consistent dimensions: genre, mood, instrument, BPM, and key. Every piece of content in the library — thousands of samples and kits — was re-tagged against this system. The same instrument now had one name. Mood descriptors were standardized. BPM values were filled in. The entire catalog finally spoke the same language.
Getting this investment approved required a reframe internally. I made the case that this wasn't a cleanup task — it was product infrastructure. The tagging system would power search, discovery, recommendations, and future personalization. Without it, none of those things scale.
Results That Reduce Steps
In 1.0, search returned kits — so producers still had to navigate inside a kit to reach individual samples. We redesigned results to surface samples directly. Combined with accurate tagging, this single change drove most of the search engagement lift.
Arcade 2.0
Homefeed & Discovery
With a clean taxonomy in place, the home feed could finally do what it was supposed to. The 1.0 feed was fully static — every producer saw the same content regardless of what they'd played, saved, or searched for. A producer who doesn't find something they love during their trial isn't going to pay. Getting users to value faster was the most direct lever on conversion.
Unified View
Merged Feed and Lines into a single Browse view, eliminating an unnecessary context-switch.
Multiple Entry Points
Previously, producers had to navigate into a full kit before previewing any samples — spending two or three minutes before realizing it wasn't what they needed. With structured tags in place, we added entry points by instrument, genre, mood, and BPM — whatever matched how they were thinking that day.
Hybrid Feed
We introduced algorithmic recommendations layered with editorial curation. The new tag taxonomy made this possible — consistent signal across the entire library gave the algorithm something reliable to work from. Fully algorithmic risked surfacing irrelevant content; fully editorial wouldn't scale. The hybrid gave us relevance at scale with a human quality check on top.
Weekly Kit Mix
A curated, auto-updating Weekly Kit Mix to re-engage lapsed users and encourage exploration. It adds a lightweight social element while surfacing trending content in a fresh and digestible format.
Prototyping & Empty States
Designing for the edge cases
Empty states
Two failure points that needed designing: what producers see while content loads, and what they see when search comes up empty.
Skeleton screens replace the blank white flash during load — producers see the shape of the content before it arrives, which keeps the interface feeling alive rather than broken. On the right, when a search returns nothing, producers aren't dead-ended. They're redirected into a Browse by view — organized by genre, instrument, and mood — with an Everything option that opens the full catalog. The session keeps moving.
Prototyping
High-fidelity prototyping served two purposes in this project. The first was the standard user testing use case — validating that interaction patterns made sense before committing to build.
The second was less conventional: using a Figma prototype as an engineering reference artifact. The search and browse interactions were complex enough that written specs were losing detail in translation. A live prototype gave engineers a ground truth they could reference during build and QA.
Components
Design system & Cross-platform
Arcade lives in two distinct environments: the web app, and as a plugin inside DAWs where producers actually make music. UI constraints differ across surfaces, but the mental model has to stay consistent — a producer who learns how to navigate on web shouldn't need to re-learn it in their DAW.
I built out the design system in Figma with properly named components tied to variables, creating a shared language between design and engineering. The taxonomy and discovery language was kept consistent across both surfaces. Developers had a single source of truth, which cut implementation confusion significantly.
Impact
Results that validated the diagnosis
Producers were finding music samples much quicker and tailored to them.
Search shifted from a last resort to a primary entry point — decreasing the numbers to only 18% abandonment.
Users finding value faster, creating new songs quicker. Still outside of the trial window but a huge improvement.
Significant drop in discovery-related support tickets. Clearer navigation meant producers could find things without outside help.
Next Steps
What this unlocked
In creative tools, momentum is the product. Every extra second between an idea and a sound is friction, and friction breaks flow state. What looked like a navigation and search problem was really a systems problem. Once we fixed the underlying infrastructure and aligned the product to how producers actually think, the surface-level improvements almost designed themselves.
Search wasn't working
63% of searches ended without a single result clicked. 23 samples browsed for every one saved. Producers were leaving without finding anything worth keeping.
We tried the easy fix
Consolidated search into a single unified view. The hypothesis: producers couldn't find results because they were scattered. The metric didn't move.
The data was broken
The problem wasn't visibility — it was the underlying taxonomy. "Percussion" and "percussive" were different buckets. We rebuilt the entire tagging system from scratch: genre, mood, instrument, BPM, key.
Infrastructure, not just a fix
Clean metadata powered everything downstream — a home feed that personalizes, recommendations that adapt, content surfacing that doesn't require manual curation. One infrastructure decision compounded across the entire product.
Reflections
Surface problems often have infrastructure roots
The UI improvements were downstream of fixing the metadata. Doing UI work first would have been redesigning around bad inputs — polished but ineffective.
Design has to sell infrastructure investment
Getting the content team to re-tag the library required reframing it as product infrastructure, not a cleanup task. Designers are often advocates for invisible work that makes everything else possible.
A prototype is a communication tool, not just a test artifact
Building a Figma prototype as an engineering reference eliminated more implementation confusion than any amount of written documentation could have.
Research & Project Goals
Based on our user research methods of conducting 1:1 interviews with producers of our existing product and studio sit-ins. We discovered 3 distincted opportunities to streamline the creative process of music making and increase discoverability.