USER INTERVIEWS
Our process started with reaching out to our users. Our goal was to understand how musicians approach collaboration and how they meet other musicians online. The randomly selected musicians were interviewed about their experiences with musical platforms, their preferred ways of meeting new musicians and showcasing their music.
“I want to take my music to the next level, but I don’t know how to approach more experienced musicians.”
“Musical collaboration requires feeling person’s energy. It’s really important to to build trust to create together.”
"It's hard to find the "right people" to collaborate with. You don't know who is legit or not."
As several trends and similarities started to form, we realized that in order to understand the company it was crucial for us to conduct contextual inquiry.
CONTEXTUAL INQUIRY
We went to Guitar Center store in San Francisco. On spot, we interviewed the manager about company’s values, policies, services, and the inside culture. We learned that Guitar Center has became a hangout spot for many musicians of all levels of expertise. They come there to play, try new instruments, meet people, and just hang out.
After analyzing the gathered data, we started to see various commonalities and trends between some people. This gave birth to our three personas: Sandra, Nick, and Ron.
SANDRA NERO
GOALS
- Have one place to upload musical files
- Get more gigs, work, collaborations
- Get more exposure
- Start making more money with music
FRUSTRATIONS
- It’s hard to find quality gigs and musicians
- It’s annoying to be contacted by amateurs
- I want to be contacted for paid work only
INSIGHTS:
1. A common trend we observed in experienced musicians who make their living by playing gigs is the struggle of finding the ‘right people’. It means, finding experienced musicians to collaborate with and legitimate projects that pay.
2. Another struggle was to establish a one stop place for all of their musical portfolio that can showcase the work and experiences to booking agents.
RON SIMMONS
GOALS
- Discover new talents on “The Center”
- Bookmark new talents’ pages
- Book talents for gigs
FRUSTRATIONS
- Hard to find the right people
- Searching for talents takes too much time
- Hard to see if artist got what it takes
- Technology that crash or is inefficient
INSIGHTS:
1. Booking agents have the same struggles: finding the right people, fast. Within seconds of scrolling through a new portfolio, a booking agent must be able to see whether an artist “got what it takes”.
2. Efficiency is key here. Hiring professionals shared a common pain with technology not being efficient, reliable, and fast enough.
3. Another struggle was not being able to contact artists directly and loosing valuable time on communicative delays.
NICK BROWN
GOALS
- Have one place to upload musical files
- Get more gigs, work, collaborations
- Get more exposure
- Start making more money with music
FRUSTRATIONS
- It’s hard to find quality gigs and musicians
- It’s annoying to be contacted by amateurs
- I want to be contacted for paid work only
INSIGHTS:
1. Many ‘bedroom musicians’ - those who are unexperienced and do not have a lot of connections in the industry - were struggling finding the ‘right people’.
2. Meeting new musicians with more experience, was a serious challenge.
3. Don’t know where to begin exploring, how to educate themselves about the industry, get exposure and experience.
PERSONAS INTO FLOWS
SOLUTIONS FOR SANDRA
Providing a one stop place for a well-rounded musical portfolio experience: showcase of audio, video, photo, and any other documentation that a user would like to be available at his profile page.
Creating “Request Intro” button, that will filter unwanted connections and help to find the “right people”.
SOLUTIONS FOR RON
- Building a premium account for business professionals that enables communication without introduction.
- Creating an easy search process.
- Easy to glance portfolios that let hiring agents have a good understanding of artist’s work.
Solutions for NICK
- Creating “Request Intro” button, that will filter unwanted connections and help to find the “right people”.
- Creating an easy search process for both, musicians and business professionals.
With all the insights and user goals in mind, we began sketching all possible solutions. Many of these ideas became the basis for our next level ideas, while others were eliminated at this stage.
After round of testing and iteration, we started digitizing our wireframes.
