UX Strategy · B2B SaaS · Media Licensing · Award-Winning
Anthem: Closing the Gap Between What a Platform Can Do and What Users Believe It Can Do
5 Alarm's platform wasn't failing users because it lacked the right features. It was failing them because users had no idea those features existed. What came in as a visual redesign brief became a platform strategy engagement.
Before and after: the original interface versus the redesigned dark mode dashboard. Visual assets have been modified for NDA compliance.
2025 Muse Design Award — Silver
Product Design UX/UI/IDX · Recognized for excellence in user experience design for B2B media licensing
Context
The Problem
5 Alarm Music is the largest independent production music library in the world, with a catalog of nearly half a million licensable audio assets serving B2B commercial creative clients globally. Founded in 2002 and later acquired by Anthem Entertainment, 5 Alarm operates as the flagship of Anthem's international portfolio of B2B licensing subsidiaries.
By 2023, stakeholders had watched playlist engagement steadily decline for three years. The platform looked dated, search results were frustrating users, and leadership wanted a visual refresh ahead of a major re-platforming initiative. I was brought in as lead strategist on a six-month engagement through Standard Beagle Studio to understand what was actually driving disengagement before committing to a design direction.
What research revealed changed the scope of the project entirely: 5 Alarm's platform wasn't failing users because it lacked the right features. It was failing them because users had no idea those features existed.
The original platform: dense metadata columns, no visual hierarchy, and a static playlist HUD dominating the workspace.
Research
What Users Actually Needed
I developed a semi-structured, remotely moderated research plan and ran sessions with ten super users spanning both internal licensing reps and external commercial creative clients. Rather than a standard usability test, I asked participants to walk me through their real workflow: interpreting a brief, finding suitable tracks, building and sharing a playlist.
Early platform audit with research notes — identifying where the interface was working against users before a single wireframe was drawn.
Three findings shaped everything that followed.
Users enter highly prepared
Users spent nearly 20% of their total task time interpreting a brief before executing a single search. They arrived with specific criteria already in mind. The platform needed to meet sophisticated users where they were rather than walk them through a generic discovery flow.
Users look before they listen
100% of users relied on visual cues to assess a track's suitability before pressing play. Album art, BPM, tempo, genre tags — these were evaluated in sequence before users committed to audio. The waveform display, which the platform prominently featured, was consistently the last thing users interacted with. Users weren't listening their way to the right track. They were looking their way there.
Users were asking for features that already existed
External users spent considerable time asking for features — AI-assisted search, drag-and-drop playlist building, lyric lookup, negative search — that were already built into the platform. Artemis, 5 Alarm's integrated AI search tool, went entirely unmentioned by external users until asked about directly. The platform had solved problems its users didn't know were solved.
Structural Challenge
The 6,000 Drakes Problem
Compounding the discoverability issue was a structural one that couldn't be fixed at the infrastructure level: vendor metadata gaming. Publishers were deliberately tagging tracks with unrelated keywords to gain catalog visibility, meaning a search for 1920s jazz would surface hundreds of unrelated results. Even the most experienced internal reps were frustrated enough to seek out competing libraries.
A search for "jazz" returning 9,806 results with no reliable quality filter — the metadata gaming problem in practice.
Since fixing the underlying metadata wasn't within scope, the strategic question became how to design around a broken system rather than depending on it. The answer was to surface Artemis as the primary search experience rather than a buried secondary option, and to pair it with browse-by filters that let users establish search context before committing to a keyword.
The platform had already solved this problem. The work was making users aware it had.
The Pivotal Finding
The Insight That Reframed the Design Direction
The finding I couldn't let go of was the visual assessment behavior. Users were already doing the cognitive work of translating a brief's emotional requirements into visual expectations before they ever searched. Album art was doing more strategic work in the task flow than any other platform element, and the platform was treating it as decoration.
If users were navigating by emotional arc, the platform needed to speak that language more fluently. The waveform display contained exactly that information, but at a scale and density that made it functionally unusable as a quick-assessment tool. What users needed wasn't the full waveform — they needed a compressed, readable signal of a track's emotional shape that could live in the track card without overwhelming the interface.
Exploring visual representations of emotional arc across different icon styles.
The final icon direction: bold forms readable at small sizes, scalable across 500,000 tracks.
Stakeholders and users responded to early concept sketches with unanimous enthusiasm. The icons needed to be prominent, legible at small sizes, and simple enough to support potential AI-generated application across the full catalog. The sharp triangular fill design was selected for its boldness and ability to communicate intensity variation at lower peaks without losing legibility.
The waveform icons in context — each track card now communicates emotional arc at a glance before a user commits to listening.
Strategy
Strategic Recommendations
Four priorities emerged from research synthesis and shaped every design decision that followed.
Surface what already exists
The platform's biggest competitive liability wasn't what it lacked — it was that users couldn't find what it had. Every design decision needed to prioritize feature discoverability over feature addition.
Reduce cognitive load through progressive disclosure
Users were sophisticated and task-oriented. The platform needed to get out of their way, surfacing decision-relevant information first and putting dense secondary data behind deliberate interactions.
Design for autonomy
Internal and external users shared nearly identical workflows but served radically different briefs. The platform needed to support a modular, configurable workspace that users could adapt to the demands of a specific project.
Make the AI visible
Artemis needed to be a named, prominent, toggle-able feature with clear signposting — not an icon users had to stumble across. The AI wasn't the problem. The interface's failure to introduce it was.
Design Decisions
What Got Built
Three previously siloed user flows — search, results review, and playlist management — were consolidated into a single coherent conversion funnel. The static playlist HUD that had dominated the workspace was replaced with a collapsible drawer, reclaiming screen real estate without sacrificing access. A toggle between track, album, and label views gave users the configurability they had asked for. Advanced search was pulled out of a two-level submenu and given appropriate visual weight.
Wireframe flow architecture — mapping how three previously siloed flows were consolidated into one coherent conversion funnel.
Key interaction changes
AI toggle — surfacing Artemis as a named, prominent, opt-in feature.
Browse-by filters — contextual entry points before committing to a keyword search.
Playlist drawer — replacing the static HUD with a collapsible column revealed on demand.
Wireframe iterations
Four of the original research participants were available to review first-round wireframes. Their feedback drove a second iteration that refined the drawer interaction, reframed the AI search as a named toggle rather than a signifier-only update, and introduced suggested search filters in the secondary navigation.
Search with browse-by filters in the secondary navigation.
Album view toggle — a visual-first browsing alternative to the track list.
Home page wireframe showing the playlist drawer concept and reclaimed workspace real estate.
Visual design and white label system
The visual redesign was designed from the start as a white label foundation deployable across Anthem's five international B2B licensing subsidiaries. A dark mode interface with a retro-futurist aesthetic, 60s-inspired pill shapes, and a contemporary typographic system gave the platform a distinctive identity that stakeholders felt was authentic to the organization's roots while making it a standout in a category not known for design ambition.
Final track card components — waveform icons alongside BPM, stems indicators, and progressive disclosure of secondary metadata.
The final platform across four primary views: track, versions, stems, and album.
The complete prototype in action — sidebar navigation, drawer, AI toggle, track cards, and waveform icons all working as a unified system.
Visual assets have been modified to protect proprietary information in accordance with NDA requirements.
Results
Outcomes
Prototype testing returned a 95% user success rate, validating the strategic direction before a single line of production code was written and giving stakeholders the confidence to move forward with full development.
Prototype success rate
Validated the strategic direction before development began.
More completed pitch decks
Playlist completion rate increased significantly post-launch.
Tracks per playlist
Average playlist volume increased by eight tracks per session.
Playlist volume increased by an average of eight tracks per session and the percentage of completed pitch decks rose by nearly 20%. Time to complete a playlist dropped by ten to forty-five minutes depending on brief complexity — a range that reflects the genuine variability in what B2B commercial licensing work requires rather than inconsistency in the solution.
2025 Muse Design Award — Silver
Product Design UX/UI/IDX · Recognized for excellence in user experience design for B2B media licensing
Several initiatives remain on the roadmap for the full platform launch, including a custom API integration for AIMS, 5 Alarm's next-generation AI companion, and scaled implementation of the iconic waveform assets across the full catalog — an infrastructure challenge that prevented full rollout in this phase but remains one of the strongest opportunities in the pipeline.
Reflection
What This Project Demonstrates
Anthem came in as a visual redesign brief and became a platform strategy engagement. The most valuable contribution to this project wasn't the design execution — it was the insistence on understanding why engagement was declining before deciding what to build.
The discoverability insight changed the strategic direction. The visual assessment finding produced a solution nobody had asked for that everyone immediately recognized as right. Both came from looking at the problem systemically rather than executing against the original brief.
The platform had already solved its users' biggest problems. The work was designing an interface that made that legible.
That's the through-line between this project and everything else in my practice: the most important strategic move is usually made before anyone opens a design tool.