Grateful Dead: UX Strategy and Redesign for a Legendary Archive

Challenge

Dead.net housed a deep archive of Grateful Dead content, but the experience had become difficult to navigate at scale. Fans were coming to the site with different levels of knowledge and intent — from casual discovery to highly specific searches through shows, releases, stories, and band history.

The challenge was to make a large, legacy content ecosystem easier to understand and explore without flattening the character of the band or alienating a deeply invested fan base.

My Role

UX Lead
Research, information architecture, wireframing, and redesign support

My Approach

Before moving into visual design, I helped define how fans actually used the archive. I conducted and reviewed survey feedback from site visitors, developed audience personas around different fan behaviors, and used sorting exercises to understand how people grouped and related the site’s content.

That research informed a revised information architecture for the archive. I mapped content relationships, explored navigation models, and designed wireframes for key archive pages and discovery paths. The goal was to make the content easier to browse, search, and understand while still respecting the depth and legacy of the Grateful Dead catalog.s.

Result

The redesigned experience gave Dead.net a clearer structure for presenting a large and historically important archive. Fans could more easily move through releases, shows, stories, and related content, while the site retained the richness and personality expected from one of music’s most dedicated communities.

The process also gave the team a stronger foundation for future archive expansion by grounding the design in research, user behavior, and a more intentional content model.

The system we built proved durable; it's still powering the experience years later. In 2025, I returned to the project to oversee another full re-skin. This time, I adapted the new design to the Shopify design system I helped establish across our enterprise, ensuring creative flexibility and front-end consistency.

That second evolution meant taking on a more hands-on role: applying high-fidelity design updates, optimizing production assets, and aligning our work with both internal tools and external creative direction.

Key Skills

• UX Research

• Information Architecture

• Persona Development

• Card Sorting / Similarity Mapping

• Wireframing

• Content Strategy