Music player and event/ticketing app for Chicago radio station Q101. The goal was to take the radio station past old school terrestrial radio, providing useful content and features for Chicagoans wanting to listen and attend local concerts.
The success of the Q101 app led to its patterns and processes being adopted by other stations across the country in the portfolio. This early exposure to system thinking for reuse, alignment, and scalability directly informed my later work leading the Palette Design System at Ulta Beauty.
The Q101 digital presence needed a mobile experience that felt on-brand, easy to use, and aligned with how listeners interacted with live radio, playlists, and station content.
There was no previous mobile app, so the work required defining the experience from the ground up.
I owned the end-to-end planning and design of the app. This included:
This was hands-on, craft-focused work that helped shape my product design approach.
This project was a turning point. It didn’t just solve a problem for Q101, it demonstrated how thoughtful, reusable design could elevate the entire network. The patterns and processes developed here laid the groundwork for my later work in design systems, showing me the power of scalable, user-centered solutions.
The Q101 app is foundational to my career. It was where I first saw how design could bridge brand, user needs, and technical constraints at scale. The experience taught me to think in systems, not just screens, and sparked a passion for creating reusable, adaptable solutions. This project didn’t just shape my approach to product design—it set the stage for how I’d later build and advocate for design systems, ensuring consistency and efficiency across teams and products.
