Bandcamp Redesign

Problem: the Now Playing bar disappears on scroll, so users lose orientation on what’s playing and it’s harder to stay in a listening flow. Featured treats genres, artists, and tracks as static—curiosity has nowhere to go—and menus drift between Featured, Music Feed, and Messages. Solution: a sticky Now Playing rail, consistent menus with a modal when purchase isn’t on-device (routing people back into discovery), and card-based Messages to match the other feeds.

Problem: top-right filters read ambiguous—hard to tell what they do or whether they’re on—so discovery stalls; clearing filters and search memory are weak. Solution: location and format controls brought into thumb-friendly positions with obvious state, a dedicated clear-filters affordance, and recently searched to support recognition over recall.

Problem: tracks look arbitrarily unpurchasable, menus feel inconsistent, and checkout throws a long list of options and currencies with little explanation—especially why digital purchase doesn’t resolve on mobile. Solution: lock icons plus a short modal on gated playback, purchase options grouped by format to reduce load, and explicit copy on desktop-only digital downloads (and the platform constraints behind that).

Problem: mixed owned vs. wishlist vs. unowned playback hides the rules—queues and playlists feel missing without explanation; Radio lacks scrubbing despite not being live; empty states don’t help recovery. Solution: surface queue and playlist on owned tracks, wishlist and lock affordances on unowned tracks with an explainer modal, and clearer recovery paths when the system says no.

Problem: the Radio surface overwhelms—unclear whether you’re hearing talk or music, little sense of past episodes, weak typographic hierarchy, and the same inconsistent purchase menus. Solution: tighter hierarchy, labels, and modals so the format reads quickly and listening is the default action.