#arcade

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.

Opportunity

Approach

Content, with Context

The key reframe I pushed early: this isn't a search or navigation redesign. It's a taxonomy and workflow redesign. 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 — thousands of samples and kits — 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.

The result was fragmentation. "Percussion" and "percussive" were separate tags returning different results — a producer searching one had no idea the other existed. "Sound design," "texture," and "organic" described the same sonic 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 tiny, disconnected pools.

Low relevance bred low trust, and low trust meant producers stopped searching and started leaving. This also meant the home feed couldn't do anything intelligent — algorithmic recommendations require consistent signal to work from. Fixing the taxonomy wasn't one of the solutions — it was the prerequisite for all the other solutions. That's why we tackled it first.

We organized the redesign around three high-traffic pillars — the only places that could actually move the conversion needle:

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.

1. Play, Browse, and Your Stuff.

2. Removed Sidebar

3. United the kit player and browser experience.

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.

1. 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.

2. 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. Re-tagging thousands of pieces of content is a significant ask of the content team, and the value isn't immediately visible in the UI. So 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. Once that framing landed, the investment made sense.

3. 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.

1. Unified View

Merged Feed and Lines into a single Browse view (eliminating an unnecessary context-switch).

2. Multiple Entry Points

Previously, producers had to navigate into a full kit before previewing any samples inside it — spending two or three minutes before realizing it wasn't what they needed. With structured tags now in place, we added entry points by instrument, genre, mood, and BPM — whatever matched how they were thinking that day.

3. Hybrid Feed

We introduced algorithmic recommendations layered with editorial curation. The new tag taxonomy is what made this possible — consistent signal across the entire library meant the algorithm had 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.

4. Weekly Kit Mix

We added 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

Search empty states and "no results" flows were designed to redirect without dead-ending. If a search returns nothing, producers see related suggestions based on adjacent tags — keeping momentum rather than breaking the session.

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.

CLICK TO PLAY ON FIGMA

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

Next Steps

What this unlocked

By rebuilding the taxonomy as product infrastructure, the redesign created a foundation for features that weren't possible before: personalized recommendations based on usage patterns, cross-surface sync, and discovery features that could adapt over time without requiring manual curation.

The system also reduced operational overhead — fewer support tickets, fewer tutorial videos needed, and a design system that let engineering move faster with less back-and-forth on implementation details.

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.

Reflections