50 Days of Songkick

Adila Golam Rassoude
Songkick
Published in
5 min readApr 16, 2018

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Almost 50 days ago I started my new role as a UI Designer at Songkick in Hoxton, so in true Songkicker style I have decided to write a blog post about it and share my experience of working at such a great company! It’s mainly very twee and full of me riding bikes and the sun shining and all that — only joking, that’s not my life at all!

Traditionally I have worked as a Digital Designer for big corporations such as BBC and Sainsbury’s, places that have at least 198,718,890 people in the building, which can make you feel a bit insignificant. Coming to a place with under 30 people has been such an eye opener and allowed me to be closer to the products I am designing for.

My new desk!!

Week 1

Songkick is a concert discovery website that allows you to find and track your favourite artists and discover whether or not they are on tour. You can also be notified when they are performing in your town! It’s great :) There is also a iOS and Android app. So far, makes sense. THEN I found out about SONGKICK Tourbox. The digital artist management tool where managers can upload gig dates and ticket links which will display on the Songkick website.

Karim the Design Director drew this picture to help me understand what is happening….

Drawing by Karim, I like the robot on the left hand side

The rest of the week was smooooothhhh sailing! I was set up and ready to work, none of this “oh we need to contact IT to get approval, it will take 3 weeks”, I was ready to roll by 2pm on Monday. My first day was also an introduction into kick off meetings, a conversation between different disciplines in the product team to discuss why, what and how we intend to build a new feature. This is with the Tech Lead, Developer, Customer Support representative, Test Lead, UX Designer and UI Designer. Here everything is discussed and agreed and then after the meeting a slack group is created as a means to communicate quickly with everyone working on the feature. This fast pace way of working is, I am guessing, AGILE. A word that flies about in big corporations but really difficult to implement. This helped to shape my understanding of how fast paced and efficient products are shipped here at Songkick.

I also spent a lot of time getting to know the team better! We have team lunch, where somebody cooks for the team on Wednesday, Donut buddies, where you get paired up with a random person from the team each week so you can spend 30 minutes with them to get to know them and we have Sobremesa — where somebody can present annnythinggg they want to about their interests. For my first week I got to learn about FURRIES. AND IT WAS BLOODY AMAZING!

My first week was fun and exciting and I felt empowered to make design decisions — such a great feeling.

Doughnuts from Doughnut Time, Learning about Furries and My Welcome pack :)

Week 2

Week 2 was NYLON (New York/London) week, where the team from NY arrived to spend the whole week with us. The week was jammed packed with great team bonding evenings! We went to a quiz night at the Lexington on Monday (where the Quizmaster is literally the best human being in the world), Tuesday night was pizza and EXTREME Ping Pong and Thursday was a Songchick breakfast at Dishoom- a time where the Ladies that run Songkick get together and have nice chats.

We also had a Hack Day which was a fantastic way for me to work with the Engineering team to understand what type of magic they do. I learned about Big Query that day (mind blown for real) You can read more about what we got up to here

It also snowed loads that week, and make everything look oh so pretty. But boy it was properly blitz.

First Hack Day and Wonderball at Bounce

Week 3

This week started off the best because a dog called Newton was in the office, I think he is the CEO or something.

CEO Newton

This was the week that it was discussed that I would be leading on a design system for Songkick. Design systems are complex things and traditionally done by a team of remote people who create it and then publish the documentation online.

We didn’t want to work like this, so we started from scratch and picked a few books to read; Brad Frost, Atomic Design and Alla Kholmatova, Design Systems. Both books have provided a really good insight into how to create a design system in a small-medium sized company. The first step was to conduct a visual audit, so we decided to screenshot all visual elements, print them out and group them into sections using the Interface Inventory template.

The start of a design Audit

Other great things that happened in week 3 is that I hosted the team lunch and made (my Dad made) Mauritian food. We made a full blown vegan meal using spinach, potatoes aubergine and rice! Everyone was super happy to try food from Mauritius. We also had passionfruit cocktails and played a game called Fibbage.

Passionfruit cocktails and mocktails, Newton chillin’ and eating Mauritian grub :P

Week 4

This week was super duper productive, I worked with the team to ship SVG charts into some of our Tourbox platform, as well as a redesign of the data tables. This has formed the beginning of a visual style that we will use and maintain in the design pattern. The design inventory took shape and we identified 15 different types of buttons. Next steps are to identify the user story for the buttons, see what is common and ensure that styling varies in accordance to that.

This is me when I started to look at the board too much.

Me, in real life

I won’t continue with this because, you know 50 days is a bit long, but I think to conclude it’s clear that here at Songkick there is a great empowering culture, where we work hard and deliver, but also really get to know each other including what we love outside of work.

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