Bounce
A Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) platform for real-time music production collaboration.
Timeline
4 months (Aug โ Dec 2025)
Role
Solo Product Designer
Outcome
Designed a new take on DAWs to support remote music collaboration.
Overview
What are Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs)?
DAWs are industry-standard softwares for producing music. Common functionalities for DAWs include but not limited to recording, editing or mixing a piece of music.
Why a daw and why now?
Being a musician...
I notice that music is a collaborative process similar to other art forms and disciplines, but DAWs have been built for solo work since the beginning until these digital days. The internet seems to agree with me.
initial problem discovery
solution highlights
(psst...a sneak peak just for you: hereโs Bounce)
Soโฆhow did I get here?
I started with research to define the problem.
user survey & Interviews
Understanding the producing process & current DAW usage
To investigate my hypothesis, I conducted a small survey with 10 musicians/producers with 5-10 years of experience and interviewed 6 of them.
Survey results and an affinity map of lots of insights from interviews
Here are emerging insight patterns that guided me to my design direction:
From these insights, I refined initial HMW to better address these specific needs:
support direct file and version management in DAWs to help alleviate time cost for sound engineers and producers?
make remote music collaboration in DAWs feel as natural and expressive as being in the same room?
help musicians of all level adapt to DAWs quickly?
How might Iโฆ
Some notable iterations that defined the final versions:
Maximizing focus by abstracting workflows
In the quest of challenging the traditional DAW interface pattern to replace with a more intuitive, I separated production apart from post-production. This created the challenge of connecting them together while keeping complex functionalities intact. The final 3 modes proved to be more intuitive for seeing this connection.
4 screens for 4 modes, too complex
1 screen for 3 modes, simple
Communication channel
Placing communication in the top right corner instead of left proved to be more discoverable to users through testing. Additionally, improvements in labels (โJamโ to โTeamsโ) and visual nature of the components (fixed vs. floating) added to discovery and utility success rate.
fixed comms bar and vague language
flexible position and intuitive language
Toolbar
From testing, I refined the information displayed in the toolbar for each mode: recording and mixing, so that only necessary functions remain.
Version 1 โ unnecessary information
Record
Effects
Plugins
Sync Current Version
Record
GRoup
ABC
Lyrics
Select
Version 2 โ Double recording function
Recording
GRoup
ABC
Lyrics
Play
ChannelS
Plugins
Effects
Play
Final Version โ essential information
Style guide
An indie and nostalgic music technological world
I take inspirations from the feeling of the "zone" โ how we can get lost in the process of making music. This is why I gravitated towards the indie, ethereal vibe building โ to reminds users that Bounce are for bouncing human ideas. Additionally, I took the name "Bounce" from the common DAW button label when exporting the final product, and the act of "bouncing" ideas off of each other.
Drum rollsโฆthe final designs!
Elaborated MVP for music collaboration
3 different views allowing focusing on different tasks with flexible panels
Real-time chat, call and video call while working on production
Recording and composing a new song
Quickly put down a musical idea with teammates to canvas with no time restrictions
Drag idea to Master Tracks area to synchronize and review the overall song structure
Mixing a song post-production
Add effects and plugins as nodes for troubleshooting semantic audio issues
Version Control
Upload local changes to the shared cloud for mutual access to the latest version of the production
results
โa guitarist/producer after testing out Bounce
Retrospective
Designing a tool for creators requires thinking in meta
It was such a fresh air to take on a challenge of creating something that others use to create with. I learned to consider the stakeholder's stakeholders โ how producers would consider their audiences' needs when they produce, and what would they need to get those results. These insights have driven my designs in wonderfully surprising ways!
Abstraction is key to convey complex functionalities
This project has humbled me and pushed me to prioritize the most efficient flows to best illustrate my product. Many details such as building the audio library or bypassing custom plugins needed to be abstracted in order to communicate my core ideas, especially to non-target users.
A solo project, but I was not alone
I am lucky to have received supports and feedback from both of my designer and musician communities in this projects. Co-creating a DAW with actual producers has opened my eyes in how I'd approach design โ more daring, more innovative, and more human. It has been a rewarding sprint, and I am deeply grateful for every help along the way ๐