Closing SoundCloud's mobile search gap to improve discovery for core listeners.

Core listeners, like music enthusiasts, DJs, and music producers rely on SoundCloud to find music.
Unlike the web experience, mobile search offers no filtering capabilities for discovery, leaving its most engaged users with a fundamentally broken discovery tool.
My goal was to bring SoundCloud’s web filtering capabilities to mobile, giving core listeners the ability to search with the same specificity they already had on desktop.
My Role
User Research
UX Design
UI Design
Prototype Developer
Deliverables
Heuristic Audit
User Interviews
Low-Fidelity Frames
Live Prototype
Tool Stack
FigJam
Figma
ChatGPT
Claude
VS Code
GitHub
Vercel
Before I designed anything, I needed to understand where mobile was falling short and why core listeners weren't pushing back.
The audit confirmed that mobile had zero filtering while web offered relevance, time, length, and tags.
To understand how that gap was affecting real users, I talked to core listeners about how they actually search.

"I usually find music when I search through 'related tracks' of a song I like"

Isabelle, 28 years old

"I typically sort the search by newness and relevance to my search"

Martin, 32 years old
But on mobile, none of that was possible.
So instead of discovering new music, they defaulted to related tracks and saved playlists. SoundCloud had become a music player, not a discovery tool.
How might we make SoundCloud’s mobile search a reliable tool for users trying to source music on the go?
Filtering was the obvious starting point because users already understood it from web, and it addressed the core problem directly. However, my audit surfaced two other directions worth naming.
Ideas I had to table for now:
Search Through Tagging
Tags on SoundCloud are artist-assigned, whcih means they can be inconsistent, sometimes absent, and not always an accurate reflection of a track's actual vibe. Building on unreliable metadata would have just moved the friction, not removed it.
Search through Beats Per Minute
This feature doesn't exist in SoundCloud's current infrastructure and this this solution would need the right technical foundation. I simply didn't find this to be a problem I could solve in this project.
Both ideas are worth revisiting. But neither was the right place to start.
I started with low-fidelity frames in Figma, designing search screens with dropdown menus to filter by relevance and by time
To validate my design decisions, I built a live prototype using React and Vite, allowing me to test interactions in a realistic environment and ensure feasibility for production
In VSCode, I prompted the Chat to help me make minor changes to the original design, simplifying it to remain consistent with SoundClouds current UI.
View Live Prototype
I believe this change meaningfully improves the mobile search experience. Enhanced search capabilities on mobile could have real potential to boost premium membership conversion
I'd love to revisit the tabled ideas down the road and explore how I'd approach designing them. What do you think — would this change how you search on SoundCloud?
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