Background
Native Instruments is a leading company creating software and hardware for music production, audio engineering, and DJing with 1.5M+ users worldwide. Native Access is the company’s central management app used by 600K+ monthly active customers to download, update, and manage their products' licenses.
Summary
The project focused on a dedicated "Discovery" tab supported by a "unified design" of the product pages in the Library tab, allowing existing users to browse the catalog and purchase items directly within the Native Access desktop application.
The work kicked off with user journey mapping and feature prioritization balanced against engineering constraints, followed by multiple iterative design rounds. After validation through user testing, the first MVP iteration delivered a 5.6% increase in conversion, a 24% increase in app engagement, and over $1.6M in revenue within six months of launch.
Native Access home page
Role
Co-leading the project alongside a content strategist, I owned the whole design lifecycle. My responsibilities spanned every phase of the initiative, from initial user research and data analysis to conceptual ideation, detailed UI/UX design, and final user validation testing.
Challenge
Following the successful redesign of the website, catalog, navigation, and product pages, our next strategic priority shifted to the desktop ecosystem. I was assigned to a new Native Access initiative aimed at elevating the end-to-end user experience and driving long-term customer retention. The core challenge was introducing a new "Discovery" tab, a catalog system that would allow existing users to seamlessly browse our massive product library and purchase items directly within the desktop application, removing the friction of forcing users to transition back to the web. This work had to be supported also by the redesign of the product pages already present in the "Library" tab, to unify the content, user experience and business scalability.
Process
Ideation
The project kicked off with the collection of designs, data, and results from the previous redesign of the website, catalog, and web product pages I worked on the year prior. This included design references, competitor analysis, content prioritization, and a feature comparison against the existing Library product pages, alongside technical constraints. To accelerate this phase, I used AI tools to synthesize competitor research, cluster content patterns, and fetch data.
Featuers and content pritization
Design
After identifying and prioritizing the content for the product pages, most prominently instrument or effect overviews, features, audio demos, the GUI, educational content, and reviews, alongside upselling and cross-selling modules, I focused on mapping multiple user journeys based on different use-case scenarios:
User who wants to discover and purchase a new product.
User who wants to manage/update a owned product.
User who bought a hardware from one of our partners and can reclaim a free product.
User journey mapping
After multiple iterative design rounds, with the help of AI tools to rapidly prototype and compare alternative information architecture options for organizing the content, refine the Discovery tab, and establish a cohesive experience that bridged the gap between the new product pages and the established Library product pages, it was time to test our ideas.
Discovery tab in Native Access
Validation
To validate the design decisions, I planned and conducted moderated user testing sessions with six participants. Using a think-aloud protocol, users were tasked with navigating three core scenarios: discovering and purchasing a new product, managing and updating an owned item, and claiming a free product. The validation yielded highly positive feedback, with users awarding the experience an average usability rating of 9/10 and praising the clear, intuitive flows across all tasks. The primary area identified for optimization was the high cognitive load on the product pages, driven by the density of the content.
Discover and purchase of a new product scenario
Outcome
With the results of the test in our hands, we opted to release a first MVP to the public and roll out the product pages' content progressively so it could also be adjusted in our content management system.
The first MVP iteration, featured the discovery page, product pages and a web redirect for purchasing, delivered immediate, high-impact results within six months of launch. The initiative achieved a 5.6% increase in conversion and a 24% increase in Native Access app engagement. Most notably, the feature unlocked a massive new stream of growth since its release, generating over $1.6M in net-new revenue while significantly strengthening long-term user retention.
An in-app checkout experience was also designed and tested with positive results from users, but was never rolled out.