Madison Audition Hub

Madison Audition Hub is a concept platform for centralizing audition discovery and registration in the Madison, WI theatre community. It serves two distinct user types: performers looking for their next role, and production teams trying to reach them.

This was my capstone project for the University of Wisconsin–Madison's User Experience Design certificate program — a full end-to-end UX process from problem framing and community research through personas, wireframes, paper prototypes, and a high-fidelity interactive prototype in Adobe XD. It's also a project I plan to rebuild in Figma and bring closer to a real product.

I came to this problem as someone who has spent years in the Madison theatre community as a stage manager and director. The frustration was personal — and that made the research all the more meaningful.

It started with a comment overheard while stage managing a show. An auditioner said, frustrated: "Why does it seem like the same people are at every audition?" It was easy to assume that was just because some performers were more passionate or prolific — but as it turned out, actors genuinely weren't hearing about auditions. And production groups were struggling to attract new talent. The problem wasn't passion. It was access.

The Madison theatre scene is active and passionate — but finding your way into it as a performer is harder than it should be. Audition announcements are scattered across Facebook groups, individual company websites, email lists, and word of mouth. There's no single place to look, and knowing which channels to monitor requires already being in the know.

On the production side, the problem is the mirror image. Companies post wherever they can — their own website, Facebook, email lists — but there's no guarantee performers are watching those specific channels. Registration paperwork is still largely paper-based or ad hoc, with stage managers manually tracking who's read for which scenes in spreadsheets and notepads.

The result: performers miss opportunities. Production teams spend unnecessary time on logistics. And the friction of the process adds stress to what should be an exciting creative pursuit.

Research started with the community — a survey distributed to both performers and production teams to understand how each group currently navigates the audition landscape.

The mismatch was immediately visible: actors go to Facebook first, but productions prioritize their own email lists and websites. Neither group is optimizing for where the other is looking.

Three clear themes emerged: the need for a single centralized source, frustration with re-entering the same personal information for every audition, and the difficulty of managing scheduling conflicts across multiple productions.

The research surfaced two fundamentally different users — not just different roles, but different mental models and goals. Designing for both in the same interface was the central design challenge.

The Design Metaphor: Theatre Posters

Early sketches explored several directions — information-dense cards, fast pre-registration flows, grid-breaking layouts. But the idea that resonated most was grounding the design in a metaphor familiar to every theatre person: the poster.

A theatre poster communicates three things immediately: an eye-catching image, the show's name, and the dates. That's exactly what an audition listing needs to do. The "More Info" button became the equivalent of walking past a poster, being intrigued, and stepping closer to read it. The metaphor shaped not just the visual design but the information hierarchy — image, title, dates first, details behind a tap.

Navigation Model

I designed a multilevel navigation model where each level contains its own stepwise flow, and every step has an escape hatch back to the landing page. This was important because audition registration involves discrete tasks — each with their own sub-steps — and users needed to feel oriented and able to bail out at any point without losing progress.

Three Core Task Flows

A key insight during Lo-Fi prototyping: I kept asking myself "what can the user end up doing here?" — a habit carried over from years as a QA tester. That instinct helped me identify edge cases and escape paths early, before they became expensive to fix in a higher-fidelity prototype.

Usability testing covered both performer and production team flows, with participants walking through pre-registration and listing creation tasks. The results were largely positive — but surfaced two significant issues that drove meaningful design changes.

Finding 1: Filtering logic was invisible

The original design used numbers on each listing to indicate how many search criteria it matched. Testers completely missed it. The numbers didn't communicate their meaning without explanation, and the filters themselves were visually too large and bold — drawing the eye away from the listings they were meant to clarify.

The fix: simplified to two clearly labeled rows — "Exact Match" and "Partial Match" — simpler, scannable, and immediately understandable. The animated re-sorting idea from ideation was noted as worth revisiting in future testing.

Finding 2: Registration forms felt overwhelming

Both testers noted that the form pages felt "busy." The sidebar displaying show information was competing for visual attention with the form fields themselves.

The fix: moved the show info sidebar to the top of the page and made it collapsible. Users who need context can expand it; users ready to fill out the form can collapse it and focus.

Bonus finding: Recommendations

One tester suggested using a performer's past audition history to recommend similar upcoming auditions. This wasn't in scope, but it's a strong signal: users were already thinking about the platform as a persistent relationship, not a one-time tool. That's a meaningful validation of the "save your info" concept.

The final Hi-Fi prototype in Adobe XD captured all three task flows with full interactivity. The landing page showed a personalized greeting and a grid of real Madison productions — Cabaret, Gruesome Playground Injuries, Small Mouth Sounds, A Chorus Line — making the prototype feel immediately grounded in the actual community it was designed for. Testers described the overall experience as clean, navigable, and easy to understand.

What the prototype also revealed was how many open questions a real product would need to answer. How does account creation work? How does a user get affiliated with a production company? Who authorizes that affiliation? These weren't failures of the design — they were the natural result of going deep enough into the problem to find its real edges. The more questions you answer, the more questions need answering. And that's a sign you're actually solving something real.

This project is one I intend to return to. The Madison theatre community is real, the problem is real, and I now have the technical skills to build it — not just prototype it. A Figma rebuild and eventually a working Next.js implementation are both on the roadmap.