Creative Director
@ Pandora

I joined Pandora as their Creative Director and first designer shortly after the company was founded. On my second day (after assembling desks and file cabinets from IKEA), I sat down at a table with the three founders and said, “So tell me about the product.” Their response: “There is no product, that’s what we hired you for.”

I spearheaded the idea of radical simplicity. In contrast to all of the music sites of the time, our goal was to give listeners the perfect music for them with just one click.

By designing a radically new interaction model for music listening and discovery, we acquired many millions of users, leading to our IPO.

Pandora logo
A sample web page from the Jazz Discovery app we designed for Barnes&Noble
An early music kiosk design for Best Buy
A sample page from our music discovery center application

Pandora was originally founded as Savage Beast Technologies. In that first year, we developed music recommendation services for Best Buy, Tower Records, and Barnes&Noble. I did all of the UX, visual design, and a good part of the front end.

Our goal was super simple and friendly user experiences, to counteract the complexity of existing music websites and services.

The first version of the Pandora web app

Eventually we settled on Internet radio as our primary focus and rebranded as Pandora. I completely redesigned the experience to be simple, beautiful, and fun. The goal was “one-click radio,” a service so simple that you didn’t have to know anything but the name of your favorite song.

In the first week after launching the free version of Pandora, we had to double our server capacity three times. It was a hit!

A laptop showing the second generation design of Pandora on the web

When we were ready for v.2, my goal was to bring a beautiful, painterly quality to the experience. I hired a talented visual designer who created a new look while I worked to improve the UX. Together we maintained Pandora’s simplicity while also adding lyrics, profiles, and other key features.

iPhones showing the first version of the Pandora mobile app

When Apple opened up the iPhone to 3rd-party apps, Pandora was one of the first. I followed Apple’s earliest design standards while maintaining the feel of Pandora.

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