Discoverability

Jaxsta started with one core idea, ‘credit where credit is due’. Unlike the film and movie industry, music does not have an extensive end credit roll. The ‘who did what, where and when’ list were previously included in liner notes and booklets with CDs and vinyls.

In the digital age, this information is stored as music metadata. Unfortunately, the majority of this information is not available to the public. Digital & streaming music only display the artist name and track title. This lack of transparency heavily affects other contributors discoverability as well as how they get paid.

Democratising music metadata

Working directly with the original music metadata custodians (labels, publishers and music royalty organisations), Jaxsta delivers a freely accessible database of official music credits.

Using a patent-pending deduplication technology, Jaxsta turns complex music metadata into intuitive inter-linked Wiki style webpages. Without lifting a finger, a digital resume is generated for every music professionals that’s ever been credited in a music project. Jaxsta’s seamless explore and search function opens up a whole new world of music discovery for music fans and professionals.

Creating Alignment

Leveraging the company’s vast network of music industry connections, we reached out to interview multiple users and identified three main personas. We decided early on that the platform will be primarily focused on serving music professionals with music fans as a secondary target. Musicians are music lovers at heart and they share pain points around finding reliable music information on the web.

Pro Tier

Advance users looking for more functionalities can sign up to Jaxsta Pro to unlock industry-specific tools:

• Dashboard - ‘Pro’ users’ homepage
• Charts - view music charts from multiple sources
• Alerts - create chart alerts and get notified via email when something is charting
• Profiles - claim, manage and edit profile page contents
• Calendar - a global calendar of music industry events
• Market - detailed international music market information

User Interface

The Jaxsta design system is named JSUIS for Jaxsta Semantic User Interface System. Its library was developed from the ground up in Sketch and Adobe XD with some early micro-interactions prototyped in Flinto.

Scalability was the key focus of the UI system. The site needs to be able to handle both data heavy situations, as well as minimal input when there’s not enough data provided from our data partners. With new features being considered each day from user feedback, we need to make sure that menus and navigations can accommodate for this. Finally, being a web app, it needed to be fully responsive, maintaining the majority of its desktop functionality even on smaller breakpoints.

The result was a reusable and modular system which ultimately helped deployment in the small development environment. The visual style follows a minimalist approach that reduces clutter and brings the spotlight back onto the credits and the people behind the music.

Test early, test often

Early validation and testing can help save a lot of grief in the long run. Due to strict confidentiality agreement at the beginning of the project (for good reasons), we were unable to test the product with real users. After the initial beta testing phase, we were able to uncover a lot of unforeseen challenges, such as our choice of terminology and unclear page structures. Moving forward, we made sure to carry out testing prior to any major implementations.