NIKHIL NAIR
Digital Collaboration in music
 Soundtrap/Spotify 

Contributions
Research
UX/UI
Prototyping

Team
Lead UX, Design & Prototyping (Myself)
Design support (Kajsa) 
Design critique (Central Design team)
Research (Myself, Marianne & Estelle)
Product managing (Sourabh P)
Product managing (Joakim P)
Engineering (Björn S)
Engineering (Pedro N)
Engineering (Song L)
Engineering (Johan)
Engineering (Jonas)
Engineering (Marcin)
Engineering manager (Ashleigh)

Soundtrap developed a fully collaborative studio for musicians to partner up in real time, on the same project. We did this by making 3 significant updates to the studio.



Collaboration was a core offering at Soundtrap as it helped drive the education product in schools while also boosting usage among daily consumers.








Studio visits and interviews with musicians

We found that the momentum of a collaboration was key to it’s success. Users who communicated and made edits to the project more frequently within the first few days of starting the project were more likely to complete it. 





3 initiatives to make collaboration smooth & succesful 

1:  Preventing conflicts
2: Creative safety  
3: Enabling feedback among the collaborators. 

We measured success around tangible metrics such as :Collaboration requests: Increase collaboration requests per active user by 20%+

Session conflicts: Reduce collaboration sessions affected by conflicts (e.g., accidental mutes/overwrites) by 25%+

Engagement: Increase average collaborative session length by 10–15%

Conversion: Improve free-to-paid conversion for collaborators by 5–8%









01

Preventing conflicts and disruptions by distinguishing between shared and private actions.
 









“Somebody muting my track while I’m working on it is extremely disruptive. I might quit Soundtrap if it keeps happening.”


- Research participant

We discovered that accidentally muting a track that someone else is also working on, is one of the most disruptive things to a smooth collaboration. It even brought upon the risk of users wanting to rage quit Soundtrap.




Approaches & iterations.






The final solution allows users to mute tracks without disrupting other collaborators.

Prototype demonstrating the final design solution.



Outcomes

  • We reduced incidents of unintended track muting in collaborative sessions by 40% after launch (measured via support tickets and in-product event logs).
  • Collaborative sessions with a ‘rage quit’ indicator (users leaving within 60 seconds of a mute conflict event) dropped by 25%.
  • Support tickets related to ‘someone muted my track’ dropped by roughly one third based on tagged customer issues over 8 weeks post-launch.
  • We saw a double‑digit reduction in sessions ending immediately after a mute conflict event, based on studio analytics.






02

Fostering creative safety by visualising every user’s position in real time.

Exploration with pointers showing the users position.




Showing a user’s position in the project prevented others from accidentally overriding their work. 


The final solution had user tags appearing on the audio regions that were being worked on. It kept additional UI to a minimum – meaning no flying cursors, owing to the studio’s UI heavy interface. 

 
Chosen approach



Outcomes

Collaborative sessions where at least 2 people stayed active for 10+ minutes increased by 18%.

In follow‑up interviews, 6 of 8 participants reported feeling more ‘confident editing in parallel’ and ‘less afraid of overwriting someone else’s work’, which aligned with a noticeable drop in overwrite events in logs.






03

Enabling feedback by allowing comments between collaborators.







Outcomes

  • Projects with at least one comment were 2.3× more likely to see collaborators return within 7 days.
  • Commenting projects had 15% higher probability of converting at least one member to paid within 30 days.






Final Outcomes


These initiatives spanned multiple quarters:

  • Collaboration: Collaboration requests per active user increased by 30% within 8 weeks of launch.
  • Engagement: Average time spent in collaborative sessions grew by 18%; repeat collaborative sessions per week increased by 22%.
  • Satisfaction: NPS among collaborative users increased by +8 points, with comments frequently mentioning “smooth” and “less chaotic” sessions.
  • Business: Free‑to‑paid conversion for users in collaborative projects improved by 6%, contributing to an estimated 3% uplift in annual revenue.

We ran phased rollouts and compared cohorts with and without the new collaboration features to isolate their impact as much as possible.