Wimbo—African Music Discovery Platform
Designed a streaming experience centred on African music discovery, lyric translation, and local listening culture. ‘Wimbo’ is a Swahili word for song. Swahili is commonly spoken across East Africa.
Role: Product Designer.
Scope: Product strategy, UX research, Interaction design, Visual design.
Duration: 6 weeks.
What problem exists?
African music is globally influential, but many streaming experiences still fail to support:
Hyper-local discovery
Lyric accessibility across languages
Community-based listening
Artist visibility across African regions
Why Does This Matter?
Listeners struggle to discover music in culturally relevant ways, and artists can be flattened into generic global categories.
The Goal
Wimbo aimed to design a music streaming experience that is culturally rooted and community-driven, while helping users discover African music through region, language, and social context.
Make discovery feel local and alive.
Help users understand lyrics across languages.
Encourage community and friend-based listening.
Research
Studied existing streaming apps and their discovery models.
Looked at African visual motifs, colour warmth, and airy mobile interfaces.
Identified an opportunity for a more regionally expressive listening experience.
Interviewed 5 Indie African DJs and a radio host about their frustrations with current streaming apps and how they fall short at capturing the nuance of African music.
Wireframes
The user flow for the onboarding process leveraged existing mental models used by other streaming apps.
This reduces cognitive load while allowing the user to familiarise themselves with the app promptly.
The onboarding flow leverages APIs to shorten time-on-task and minimise friction.
I started by exploring how to make the home page feel ambient, leveraging negative space and Gestalt principles such as Common Region and Proximity to separate sections and support visual hierarchy.
Early wireframes tested whether regional content should appear as a banner, tab, or card-based module.
The music player featured one of Wimbo’s titular differentiators, which is the lyric translation that appears below the original. This allows users listening across the continent to further immerse themselves in the cultural storytelling of the music they engage with.
Design Sheet
Colour Scheme: The palette blends warm auburn tones to evoke openness and warmth, reflecting the vivid vistas of the African sky at dawn and dusk.
Material Design: Subtle liquid-glass panels provide layered depth and translucency, allowing content like album artwork and artist imagery to remain the focal point.
Mockups
Reflection
Cultural context should inform product systems, not just visual style.
Discovery-first navigation can encourage exploration in content-heavy platforms.
Language accessibility and AI-enabled lyric translation can deepen engagement with music.
Visual identity must support usability rather than compete with content.
If Wimbo were developed further, the next steps would include user testing with African listeners, refining discovery algorithms for regional music trends, and exploring artist tools that help musicians connect directly with local communities.