BandRider
Bringing structure to the chaos of live music
Responsibilities
End-to-end product design, UX strategy, information architecture, interaction design, visual design, prototyping across web and mobile.
Tools
Figma, MagicPatterns, Balsamiq
Timeline
12 weeks
Project Overview
A single live show involves more coordination than most people realize. Multiple venues. Touring teams with their own crews. Local stagehands. Production managers juggling day sheets, stage plots, input lists, hospitality requirements, and settlement paperwork—often across several shows happening the same week.
The information exists. The problem is that it lives everywhere: scattered across emails, static PDFs, text threads, and spreadsheets that go stale the moment they're sent. Ownership is unclear. Updates don't propagate. Production Managers spend more time chasing information than actually managing the show.
BandRider was designed to fix that—a platform that replaces fragmented workflows with a single, connected system where venues, artists, and crews can finally operate from the same source of truth.
From Static Documents to living profiles
The live music industry still runs on riders — technical documents that specify everything an artist or venue needs to execute a show. The problem is they're static PDFs, outdated almost immediately, recreated from scratch for every show.
I reimagined riders as living data. Artist, musician, and venue profiles became dynamic sources of truth — structured and reusable, updating automatically when a show is created.
Venue Profile - Amenities, key contacts, stage dimensions, equipment, and documents. Everything a touring act needs before arrival.
Band Profile - Band members, crew, stage plot, and a full input list specifying every channel and position.
Musician Profile - Skills, availability status, social links, and show history. Discoverable and always current.
Creating a show: Structured but not rigid
The show creation flow walks users through setup step by step: basic information (artist, venue, doors, set time, headliner, support, agents, promoters), workspace members with role-based permissions, and document selection—either using BandRider's templates or uploading custom agreements.
I designed this as a guided flow rather than a blank form. Each step is completable independently, and users can save drafts and return later. The goal was to reduce the cognitive load of spinning up a new show while preserving flexibility for edge cases.
The stepper at the top (Show details → Documents → Review → Finalize) gives users orientation throughout. They always know where they are in the process.
Operational radar, not passive dashboard
Most dashboards summarize. Production Managers don't need summaries—they need awareness. They need to know what requires attention right now.
I designed the dashboard as an operational radar. When a PM logs in, they see their active venues in columns—Belly Up, The Sound, Humphreys—each showing today's shows and tomorrow's schedule. Day sheets expand inline with time-stamped events: venue access, crew call, load-in, lunch. Below that, quick access to stage plots, input lists, tech specs, and crew contacts.
The dashboard doesn't ask PMs to go hunting. It surfaces what matters and directs focus. This establishes BandRider as a tool for action, not reporting.
The show as a living workspace
Once a show is created, it becomes a workspace—not just a record. Instead of scattered documents and disconnected conversations, all operational areas live in one place. The show view has tabs for Activity, Day Sheet, Stage Plot, Input List, Backline, Lighting, Hospitality, Settlement, Merch, and more. Each section is editable, trackable, and tied to the show's timeline.
The Activity feed shows exactly what's happened: "Payment method confirmed," "Added input list," "Updated crew sheet," "Added merchandise requirements." Every change is attributed and timestamped. No more guessing who updated what or when.
Progress indicators communicate completion at a glance—reducing the endless follow-ups that plague show coordination.
Crucially, business data lives here too. The Box Office tab shows tickets sold (456 of 600 capacity), revenue ($28,454), breakdowns by ticket type, and pricing tiers. Settlement and financial performance sit alongside logistics, reflecting how venues actually measure success.
The network: building the industry graph
Live music is a relationship business. The same crew members work across multiple venues. Artists tour with consistent teams. Agents and promoters connect dozens of shows per year.
The Network section makes these relationships visible and actionable. PMs can view their full contractor network—stage managers, audio engineers, lighting techs, security—filtered by role, linked venues, and availability. Adding a contractor triggers a connection request; once accepted, their profile becomes part of the PM's operational network.
The Search view opens this up further, showing the broader BandRider network with filters for role, location, experience, and pay range. This transforms BandRider from a show management tool into an industry-wide professional network.
Mobile: Scoped for show day reality
On show day, no one sits at a desk. Stage managers are on the floor. Tour managers are moving between green room and front of house. Crew leads are checking in vendors and coordinating load-in. They need information fast, in context, on their phones. I scoped the mobile experience intentionally for read-and-react moments. The Today view shows upcoming events with times and key details. The Shows list gives quick access to any active show. Drilling into a show surfaces Day Sheet, Stage Plot, Input List, and Tech specs—the information crews actually need in the moment.
I didn't try to recreate the full desktop complexity on a smaller screen. Mobile is about real-time alignment, not comprehensive management. The constraint was the feature.
The prototype became the central artifact for stakeholder alignment.
It helped the client secure venue backing, validate the platform direction, and move confidently into Phase 2 development. By translating a complex operational ecosystem into something tangible—something people could click through and react to—the design made the product vision real in a way that slide decks couldn't.
BandRider reinforced a principle I keep coming back to: in complex systems, clarity comes from choosing a center.
There were endless directions this platform could have sprawled. Multiple user types, multiple workflows, deep feature sets for each. The decision to anchor everything around the Production Manager's perspective gave the system a spine. From there, the rest of the ecosystem could expand with intention rather than fragmenting into disconnected tools.
It also reminded me of the power of treating documents as data. The shift from static PDFs to living profiles wasn't just a UX improvement—it was a fundamental rethinking of how information flows in this industry. That reframe unlocked everything else.
