Designing competitions for the 99% who don't win
A Competitions ecosystem for Leep Audio — reframing music contests as a recurring growth engine that rewards every artist, not just the one on top.
INDUSTRY.
Music & Entertainment
Tools.
Figma, Claude
Role.
UI/UX Design
Overview
Leep Audio is an early-stage platform for emerging music artists — a place to get discovered, get feedback, and collaborate, deliberately positioned against passive streaming. The founders came to us with a product already in beta: several sections in progress, a small community growing organically on Discord, and a clear sense of what mattered most: Competitions, the least developed area.
Three constraints shaped the work: a fixed five-week timeline, a section that had to scale to multiple simultaneous competitions, and a development handoff through the client's AI-assisted build tool (Lovable) — which meant our designs had to be build-ready: clean components, licensed web fonts.
THE OPPORTUNITY
Most platforms reward one winner and abandon everyone else
To understand the landscape, we audited direct music competition platforms like Splice, SKIO, and LabelRadar, plus adjacent creative-competition platforms like Kaggle and Dribbble. A clear pattern emerged: most platforms handle the mechanics of a contest reasonably well but are built for the winners, and everyone else is left with nothing to come back for. That gap became our opportunity.
That gap reframed the problem for us. If competitions only pay off for the winners, they can't bring artists, producers, and fans back again and again — so the real question became how you make entering worth it for the 99% who don't win? Our answer was a recommendation we brought to the founders directly: a post-competition recap every participant receives, winner or not, turning "you didn't place" into a record of what they gained. It became the Leep Recap, and it anchored everything that followed.
THE PROCESS
From a wide brainstorm to a scalable, trustworthy structure
Feature Prioritization. With that direction set, we moved from why to what. As a team, we brainstormed the full range of features a competition ecosystem could include. From there, I took ownership of prioritization — ranking each feature against user value and build effort, and protecting the ones that serve the majority who don't place first, not just the mechanics that make a contest run.
Architecture. With the feature set scoped, we mapped the information architecture for the Competitions section. We also mapped the competition lifecycle as four states — Upcoming → Open → Voting → Closed — recognizing that each state changes what a page needs to do and which action should lead.
Flows and Wireframes. From there we moved into user flows and low-fidelity wireframes — and this is where I took full ownership of the artist participation flow, end to end. I created lo-fi wireframes of the entire user journey, from browsing competitions to submitting an entry to landing on the Competition Recap: the post-competition screen that turns "you didn't win" into "here's how you grew."
The recap every participant receives — a key recommendation we brought to the founders, and they adopted.
Final rank
Track listens
New followers
Most replayed moment
Profile Visits
Design System & Components
A build-ready system for handoff into Lovable: role colors (artist, producer, fan) and the four lifecycle states — Upcoming, Open, Voting, Closed — that drive how every competition screen behaves. Clean components, licensed fonts, ready to ship.
