Across genres and experience levels, creatives need fresh approaches and inspiration to learn, evolve, and stay motivated. Musician and educator Rachel Efron had channeled her own experiences overcoming artistic challenges into a program for helping others manifest their creative potential. Energized by the results she saw in her one-on-one coaching work, she resolved to expand access to her strategies by translating her program into a self-paced, self-led digital version for mobile.

The mission was clear, but the path forward was not. How do you design an app that can understand an artist’s unique needs, recommend meaningful advice and activities based on those needs, and create an experience that feels supportive, authentic, and human-centered – without the tech getting in the way? These are the questions the client brought us in to answer.

The program that inspired Muzi was designed to help creatives identify personal areas for development across five dimensions of the creative process. In her in-person sessions, the client had delivered feedback and encouragement to participants throughout the coaching process, but now we needed a way to track and communicate a user’s progress in the app format. Playing on the concept of sparking creativity, we devised a responsive “spark” chart to convey the user’s growth over time, helping them stay motivated and on-track.

Muzi needed to put users into an open and creative state of mind, while also keeping them motivated and focused. That meant evoking the freedom and messiness of hands-on creation, without compromising usability and accessibility. Through ongoing experimentation and client feedback, we successfully balanced these goals by combining a foundation of organic textures, vibrant colors, and custom illustrations with a clean, high-contrast UI (fonts, design elements, and navigation structure), for an overall effect that is inspiring and goal-oriented.

The clients came to us imagining Muzi as a galvanizing force for inspiring, connecting, and promoting artists and their work, and we designed the MVP with this future scope in mind. We created an onboarding flow and membership tier structure designed to increase user commitment to the Muzi program over time. And we laid the groundwork for the future evolution of a network of Muzi artists that could share, collaborate, and champion each other’s creations, increasing the brand’s reach, impact, and long-term viability.