SXSW Festival Panel picker
SXSW (South by Southwest) is a global festival celebrating emerging talent in music, film, tech, and culture. Despite its scale, the artist selection process is still manual - submissions arrive by email, with no structured system for reviewing new musicians.
This project proposes a centralized platform where fans and industry experts can discover, rate, and provide feedback on artists, creating a fair, transparent, and efficient path for rising talent to be recognized.
This project proposes a centralized platform where fans and industry experts can discover, rate, and provide feedback on artists, creating a fair, transparent, and efficient path for rising talent to be recognized.
The Challenge
Email isn’t enough
1. Build a unified process for reviewing thousands of artists without emails, spreadsheets, or scattered communication.
2. Balance subjective taste with structured evaluation criteria, combining emotional reactions with professional judgment.
3. Design flows for two distinct audiences - fans and industry experts -each with different motivation, attention span, and decision-making style.
2. Balance subjective taste with structured evaluation criteria, combining emotional reactions with professional judgment.
3. Design flows for two distinct audiences - fans and industry experts -each with different motivation, attention span, and decision-making style.
The Solution
Community review + expert review
Community review + expert review
We created a two-stage evaluation process:
Community Layer
- Visual discovery + swiping exploration
- Short performance previews
- Quick emotional ratings & comments
Professional Layer
- In depth artist pages & data
- Structured scoring & evaluation tools
- Ability to shortlist, approve, or reject
Community Layer
- Visual discovery + swiping exploration
- Short performance previews
- Quick emotional ratings & comments
Professional Layer
- In depth artist pages & data
- Structured scoring & evaluation tools
- Ability to shortlist, approve, or reject
The platform blends community sentiment and expert criteria into a transparent ranking model, helping SXSW surface breakthrough artists faster, fairly, and at scale.
