BMI
BMI is one of the largest performing rights organizations in the U.S., representing more than 1.5 million songwriters, composers, and publishers. We redesigned its digital experience to make the complex organization easier to navigate and engage with.
The Challenge
BMI serves a wide range of people, from songwriters and composers to businesses looking to license music. The site also carries a huge amount of editorial content, resources, events, and information about BMI’s advocacy work. The existing experience made it difficult to know where to start or how different parts of BMI connected.
We needed to bring that complexity into a clearer, more cohesive experience without losing the depth of information its audiences rely on.
We started by looking at how people use BMI.
We audited the existing site’s content and user flows, looking for places where similar information had ended up scattered across different parts of the experience. From there, we reorganized the IA around the different ways people interact with BMI.
The new navigation gives creators, licensees, and other visitors clearer places to start, while keeping deeper resources and editorial content within reach.
There was a lot of content to make sense of.
The redesign involved a huge range of page types, from artist and songwriter profiles to news, events, resources, genres, and licensing information. We established a consistent set of layouts and content patterns so each page could handle its own needs while still feeling like part of the same site.
We wanted the site to feel alive.
We introduced motion throughout the experience to give the new brand some energy online, from ambient background effects to smaller interactions throughout the site. The goal was to make the experience feel dynamic without making it harder to use.
We also refined motion behaviors throughout development to ensure the experience remained accessible, particularly around continuous animation.
We built a system behind the scenes.
With so many page types and content needs, consistency had to extend beyond the individual layouts. I helped develop a reusable component system that gave the site a common visual language while making it easier to build and maintain new experiences.
Alongside the editorial and marketing experience, we also worked through more task-oriented areas of the site, where users need to find information, complete actions, or manage their relationship with BMI.
A more cohesive way into BMI.
The redesign brings a much larger and more varied set of content into a single system, with clearer pathways for the people who use BMI and a more consistent experience across the site.
The underlying design system also gives BMI a stronger foundation for continuing to add content and services as the organization evolves.
