Tempo

I sat with six independent artists while they opened their own statements. Regardless of catalogue size, they asked the same two things within the first thirty seconds. Did I earn more or less than last month, and which track is doing it. Everything else, platform splits, territory data, skip rates, was interesting but never urgent. That gave me a hierarchy to design against instead of a feature list.

The dashboard now opens on a single earnings figure for the current month, the change against the previous month in plain language rather than a bare percentage, and a sparkline for the last twelve. Below that, the tracks that moved most, up and down. Platform and territory breakdowns moved to a second view that is one click away and genuinely useful once you know what you are looking for.

Earnings dip for boring reasons: a playlist rotation ends, a platform reports late. The old design showed a red arrow and left the artist to panic. I added a short explanatory line under the headline figure that names the likeliest cause when the data supports it, and a clear note when a platform has not reported yet, so a partial month never reads as a collapse. Colour alone never carries the meaning, since red and green fail for a meaningful share of users.

The original file had one screen. I delivered the full set: a new artist with no earnings yet, a catalogue of one track, a month with a failed platform sync, a loading skeleton that matches the final layout so nothing jumps, and an error state that tells you which platform failed and when it will retry. That work was unglamorous and it was the part the engineers thanked me for.