Bringing your favorite artists to you
The music scene in Los Angeles is wide and diverse. It can get overwhelming and difficult to discover new artists performing their music, especially if they play in smaller venues.
Artists like BTS or Justin Bieber sell out shows in larger venues, like the So-fi Stadium, but how can music lovers find out about smaller artists playing in smaller venues near them?
As a class project where I would go through the design process from beginning to end, I decided to examine and see how I could improve the discoverability of local artists in Los Angeles since it is a city with a large and diverse music culture.
Through some extensive research, I found that many advertisements cater to bigger, more mainstream artists that play at large venues; however, there wasn't much awareness or an opportunity for smaller artists to be known or found by their listeners.
Heuristic Evaluation
To get a better understanding of what competitors were doing, I performed a heuristic evaluation of Apple's Music app and came to the following conclusions:
Based on these findings, I wanted my app to keep up with design trends with its aesthetic as well as focus on the functionality of users being able to know when and where their favorite artists are playing.
Field Research
Next, I explored vinyl record stores in L.A. to get a better picture of how artists or certain genres might be promoted. I also interviewed a couple of peers to see how they usually discover new music or find out about local concerts.
When asked how they usually discover new music, many participants stated it was usually through word of mouth or whatever was on the top charts.
Tommy has just moved to a new town and hears about his favorite artist coming to a venue near him. He wants to go to their concert but finding information about it is difficult. He gets confused by the different websites across the internet but hears about You-mak.
Once Tommy downloads the app and opens it, he is prompted to log in or make an account. He makes an account, and lands on the home page, seeing the info for his favorite artist right away. He clicks on the artist page, clicks on tickets, and a pop-up telling him he will be leaving the app to go to a 3rd party site appears, asking him to confirm if he wants to exit the app. Tommy accepts.
Stephanie has come home from a long day of work and hears that her favorite artist is playing at the Wiltern, a small venue in Koreatown. The artist isn't very popular, so Stephanie can't find much information on their tour; however, her boyfriend tells her about You-mak, which may have the info she's looking for.
Other apps don't seem to have the information Stephanie is looking for, so she turns to You-mak in hopes that she can buy tickets for the concert. She lands on the home page and opens the menu bar, seeing a tab for venues in her area. Stephanie finds the Wiltern, clicks on it, and finds the info for not only her favorite artist but also the Wiltern's upcoming concerts, some being of artists she's never heard of.
Before starting on the wireframes for this project, I wanted to create a site map of how I wanted the layout of the app to be. This gives me a better idea of how the navigation should work, which would also lead to a better experience with the navigation during the final stages of production.
Using the user personas and site map to understand the user flow helped come up with the following solutions:
Based on the conclusions and problems I found from my research I wanted to add the following features for my app:
With my knowledge of color theory and desire to keep up a modern aesthetic that would use current design trends, I created a design system that would be applied to the high-fidelity prototypes.
See the upcoming concerts of your favorite artists, look through your favorite genres, and keep memories of your past concerts.
Find Local venues near you. Discover upcoming concerts at smaller venues and learn the specifics of these new places.
Buy tickets for an artist or see their upcoming concerts and bio.
See what other concerts are happening at your favorite local venue.
The purpose of the user interviews was to receive feedback on the prototypes and then apply what I learned into the reiterations.
I did an initial pilot test along with two more additional interviews where I asked the each participant a series of questions through a Google form. I also recorded each interview, which can be found here.
I not only learned how I could improve as an interviewer when doing these usability tests, but also some insights into how I could improve the app: