SB Creative Lab UI/UX Project Teams
What if your music app actually understood how you were feeling?
UI/UX Design
Mobile App
Prototyping
Role
1 of 4 UI/UX Designers
Team
Project Manager
4 UI/UX Designers
Timeline
April - June 2025
Tools
Figma
About the Company
Reverb is a mobile app built around one core insight: the mood-based playlists that Spotify and Apple Music generate don't actually match how most people feel. Reverb uses detailed mood tracking and iterative user feedback to build a recommendation system that learns your emotional patterns over time, not just your listening history.
The Problem
Secondary research confirmed what most listeners already know: algorithmic playlists are often repetitive and emotionally off. Users reported the same songs cycling, a lack of artist diversity, and a sense that the app was guessing rather than listening.
The tension of needing emotional data to make good recommendations, while not wanting to burden the user to get it was the central design problem.
What I did, and Why
To begin with, we conducted UX research through 45+ user surveys about pains related to mood matching music and needs for various new features. Our survey findings shaped our priorities clearly: users wanted transparency (why is this song here?), control (the ability to turn features off), and discovery (music they wouldn't have found on their own).
Ironically enough, the surveys revealed that users were exhausted… by surveys. As such, any solution that required significant user input to function would undermine itself. We proposed a layered data collection approach with optional short daily check-ins that users could skip or disable entirely.
In the high-fidelity stage, we also explored using AI-generated imagery to create a unique visual world for the app, something that felt as personal and fluid as the experience we were designing for.
Impact & Takeaways
Completed full UX process from UX research and user surveys, ideation, low-fidelity wireframes, and high-fidelity prototyping
Learned to design around algorithmic systems, understanding what they do well and where they fail
Reverb pushed me to think past usability and into something closer to empathy. Mood is subjective and constantly changing, so designing an input for that is genuinely hard. The most useful thing we did was listen to users describe their frustration with existing apps, and take it seriously as a design brief.
