Project Objective

Create an application to facilitate live music events by connecting musicians and event organizers

A friend approached me with an idea for an application to make finding live performance opportunities easier for musicians, and asked me to design the user experience. This project helped me develop skills for creating a completely new product and familiarized me with the unique process involved in positioning a product against competitors.

Strategy Meeting

To start the design process, I conducted a strategy meeting to outline the goals of development.

We first outlined some of the challenges the app should address:

• ‍Established music websites seem to be confusing experiences because of how many features litter the page that are irrelevant to user needs (we call this "feature-creep").

• ‍Connecting with venues and show organizers is fragmented across multiple media - there is an opportunity to consolidate communication between parties involved.

• ‍There is no great mobile platform to find performance opportunities.

With these challenges in mind, we identified our concrete objectives:

• ‍Goals: Create a platform that makes it easy for performers and show organizers to connect.

• ‍Budget: Considering the start-up nature of the project, neither of us is being compensated.

• ‍Timeline: While there is no external pressure for a concrete deadline, the developer wanted to pursue as aggressive a timeline as is feasible. We'd be meeting every week to gauge progress and set next steps.

User Survey

In developing the app, I felt it necessary to poll musicians on their current experience with booking.

I created a survey using Google Forms, targeted our survey population, and solicited responses via musician communities on social media like Reddit and Facebook. I felt this phase was important because:

• User-centered design must be just that: user-centered. Know your audience.

• Surveying for prospective users' preferences may identify a key demographic that is underserved by existing platforms.

With the survey phase finished, we observed the following trends:

• Musicians predominantly prefer finding performance opportunities via word-of-mouth and through friends.

• A large amount of musicians use Facebook groups to network and find opportunities.

• Most musicians feel a desire for a more convenient platform with which to find opportunities to perform.

Competitor Analysis

Echo, being a platform for musicians, is certainly not alone in the marketplace.

In order to ascertain what other platforms are doing and how they are constructed, I conducted a competitor analysis with the following questions in mind:

• ‍What services do these platforms offer musicians? 

• ‍Do these platforms host conversations between musicians and show organizers?

• ‍Are these platforms paid or free? What do they offer for free?

• ‍Are these platforms focused or disparate in their feature offerings?

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To assess the current state of musician-focused websites, I took a look at Indie On The Move, ReverbNation, and Sonicbids:

On these sites I observed the following:

• Most sites offer some sort of music hosting, letting users showcase their work.

• Some offer a messaging platform, some only list contact info.

• All sites offer both a free and paid tier which separate certain features and functionality, and the free features are extremely limited.

• Most established music sites suffer from feature-creep and are not focused on any certain function.

P‍ersonas

Part of developing the app is creating personas, created from survey data of prospective users.

Personas are a critical tool in User-Centered Design; by focusing on the needs of these personas the developer ensures the audience will find the product usable and desirable. The following are the two main personas in our development process:

Site Mapping

To keep track of all of the application's features, I created a sitemap.

This step I found helpful in order to combat feature-creep as well as inform the user interface design phase of the process.

Red Route Analysis

I performed this exercise to identify the highest priority functions of the platform.

I populated this tool with data from the user survey I conducted in the analysis phase.