A role-based coordination app that replaces group texts and paper call sheets for backstage beauty teams at fashion shows.
Built with Art Partner, a beauty talent agency, as the anchor client. I'm the sole product designer on the project, working from research through interaction design, visual design, and front-end build.
Producers lose track of which models are hair-done, which are still waiting on nails, and where each artist is stationed, all while working against a fixed, unforgiving show clock. Most teams coordinate through group texts, paper call sheets, and word of mouth.
Show Partner is an in-house tool for backstage hair and makeup teams—and the people who direct, manage, and hire them. It connects live show-floor coordination with the planning and post-show work that happens around it.
Earlier rounds with a producer and an agent had already shaped the app's role hierarchy. This phase went further: observing a live show backstage directly, then interviewing every persona in the environment the app is meant to support.
Watching the workflow in person, rather than relying on secondhand descriptions, showed how physically distributed the team is across a venue, how much coordination happens through shouted updates and quick glances rather than any written system, and how tightly every task is bound to the show clock. Any feature that adds friction to a Producer's or Artist's in-the-moment workflow gets rejected fast, no matter how useful it looks on paper.
Assistants move constantly within a small station footprint. Live tracking added noise, not information, so Assistants get one static pin drop for their station instead.
Leads and Assistants can still log receipts, but that access moved to Settings, keeping the main Studio tab reserved for the Artist role.
Agents review budgets and rosters after the fact and have no need for live coordination views, so the Agent desktop stays separate from the live app.
Producers and Artists rate Assistants. Assistants don't rate each other, matching how accountability actually works on a real show floor.
Each view is shaped around the work that person is responsible for during or after a show. The differences come from the research—not from adding arbitrary permission levels to one generic interface.
The interface needed the clarity of an operational tool without looking disconnected from the fashion world it serves. I paired editorial typography and warm neutral surfaces with restrained status colors, compact labels, and fast transitions so the product feels considered without slowing anyone down backstage.
I led the product from research and role definition through interaction and visual design, then used Claude Code to build the React application. GitHub keeps the work versioned, and Vercel hosts the live product. That lets me test ideas in the real interface—not only in a design file—and carry what I learn into the next round.
Moving from remote interviews to a live show floor confirmed decisions already made from earlier research, and surfaced friction I wouldn't have caught otherwise, especially how little tolerance Assistants and Leads have for anything that slows down a status update mid-show. Designing for four genuinely different roles, rather than one interface with permission layers, has cost more upfront design and build effort, but it means each person opens an app built for the job they're actually doing.
