Finding the perfect music for your project is challenging at every stage: getting high-quality music from talented people, ensuring it’s the perfect match for your project, and trudging through the managers, labels, producers, and more that need to say “yes” before you use it. It takes a long time. Too long. To support the fast-paced nature of content creation in a digital age, Ritual’s founders wanted to buy high-quality music straight from producers, make it easy to find the perfect track, and license it directly to content creators.

With an understanding of the existing problems in the market, we set out to determine what would make an MVP offering truly stand out. Collaborative sessions with the Ritual team led us to four key features: searching for music by mood and genre, a player that paired Ritual’s music with your own muted video footage, a straightforward checkout experience, and a mobile-first design.

As the UX process began, our biggest challenge was how people search. We had to find a way to accommodate unique search styles so that this single bar was their easiest, simplest way for every user to get the music they needed. The design team moved through multiple iterations, validating ideas with speedy user testing methods like paper prototyping.

At launch, the Ritual MVP was a fully functional marketplace for music. It had a complete checkout experience with straightforward ecomm, a video player that let you load videos from YouTube and Vimeo to see how Ritual tracks fit, a framework and algorithm for tag management and search results, and everything worked beautifully on mobile.

As a new entry in the market, it was vital that every user touchpoint work smoothly. Something as fundamental as smooth audio on the web requires careful consideration. By using a single-page app from day one, we avoided refreshes and kept a user’s song playing as they browsed. These potential users were also able to get a more complete experience, because several features that would normally require an account (liking songs, tracking a play count, etc.) were made possible by utilizing Amazon’s DynamoDB.

Since our engagement wrapped up, a member of the Invoke team working on the project has joined the Ritual team full time. Invoke coached and prepared them throughout the process, ensuring that they were ready to be Ritual’s first employee and continue to guide the evolution of the product. In addition to creating a roadmap for future development of the product, we have given Ritual a product philosophy based on the research and work we did together. A philosophy that will guide their work beyond the roadmap.

The evolutions of their product have been incredibly impressive. Already, their team has integrated machine learning and AI into the music discovery process as well as an AI video assistant that scrapes stills from your video and determines relevant search terms. We’re excited to see what comes next.