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Spotify & SoundGirls – Helping to Equalize Women in Sound
 

Information
Client
Spotify, Sound Girls
Focus
Concept, Creative Direction, UX / UI Design, Visual Design, Technical Strategy, Backend Development, Frontend Development

Spotify and SoundGirls partner to help increase representation and opportunities for female identifying producers and engineers

The EQL Directory is a unique collaboration between Spotify and SoundGirls, aiming to help increase representation of women and gender nonconforming sound workers.

Female workers still only make up some 5% of the producers and engineers in the audio industry, and only 12.3% of songwriting credits go to women. So Spotify and Soundgirls - a platform dedicated to promoting the next generation of women in audio - decided to create a directory tool to solve the problems facing employers seeking audio expertise who “want to hire women but can’t find any.”

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Addressing the brief meant creating something that highlights their experts’ skills and résumés (rather than simply photos of them). We ultimately created a Yellow Pages-inspired design, built with a modern spin and smooth search experience.

Building the EQL Directory required an innovative approach to search, making the individual entries discoverable by both skills and location. 

Made up of thousands of individual profiles, we opted for a minimal design, emphasising the functionality of the tool in an instantly familiar search experience.

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    183% increase in number of users in 4 months following launch
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    Over 1,700 profiles for female and gender non-conforming audio professionals

Our design leadership has incredibly high standards and were very impressed by how wild develop an intuitive and impactful visual design system, UX and UI for makeiteql.com. I couldn't have imagined a better outcome with a different partner.

Jacky Tran Sr. Producer Digital Brand & Creative, Spotify

The challenge here was to both efficiently explain this unusual project to users, and guide them through the testing ground as intuitively as possible. We made sure that a handsome, bespoke, and shareable personalized graphic was the result at the end of the experience too.

Design Leads
Matthias Mentasti, Thomas Lichtblau
Tech Leads
Thomas Ragger, Moriz Büsing
Project Managment
Suzana Orsolic
Design
Manuel Haring
Development
Moriz Büsing, Florian Nebenführ, Maximilian Uhlig
Strategy
Paul Aaron