My first design challenge! Soundbox is an idea for a music streaming service that helps you learn about local bands so you can support your community.
Locals only
Discover your city’s gems and support them
After talking with several music lovers I met during the first few weeks of my program, I learned that its not easy to find shows for local bands. You almost have to follow every single venue on social media to even find one you might be interested in. And even then its not really reliable! Music lovers want to go see local bands, support them, and propel their local industry.
Goal
Support your community
The goal is to create an app with features that will facilitate music lovers finding concerts for small and local bands. Finding these bands will help them be able to support the bands, and thus inject various music scenes across the country with life.
Team and Role
My part and the ones who helped me
I worked on research, UX design, and UI design on this product. I’m grateful to a few of my old coworkers for discussing the topic with me candidly. They gave me a feel for how people find shows/artists now.
Target Audience
Who do we aim to please?
The ideal candidate for this would be people in their 20s and 30s who are willing to go out to local bars and small venues to see shows. These users love music and interact with streaming platforms regularly. They also have a desire to support good music by purchasing merchandise or music. We call these people “listeners.”
Discovery Phase
Interviews and data analysis
To learn more about the target user, I found 3 people who fit the bill. Participant 1 is a listener who collects vinyl records with her husband. Participant 2 is a guitarist in an indie rock band who regularly is seeing local shows. Participant 3 is a listener who only uses streaming services; however they would like to support musicians better.
From my interviews with the 3 participants, I had a few main takeaways:
- They have no idea how to search for bands in their area.
- They discussed even greater difficulty finding shows for bands that weren’t the giant stadium shows. One participant noted that might be an ads space problem.
- The listeners want to listen to local music because they believe it will connect them to their community better, which will lead to a better listening experience overall.
Solutions
The build and how I rushed it
To be completely fair, I started this project very early in my design journey. As such, I didn’t follow any real design flows like I have in other projects.
I started by doing some sketches and a user flow for the product.
Then I really dove in and just hammered out a high fidelity design without even doing any testing on the previous work.
Though I’m proud of the UI work on the pages, the UX was lacking here. All decisions based off a gut feeling rather than a specific decision.
Results
Fun UI, lacking UX
This project was fun. The UI bit was nice for my first challenge, and I loved talking to possible users and doing interviews. However, since I was so excited to get going I rushed through the UX process and I didn’t do any tests.
I also was able to create a landing page for a marketing site.
Reflections
What I’d do differently and how I can improve this
If I devoted more time into this, I would turn it back and start from the research. Then I could do a few different things
- I can do some real tests, competitive research, and more interviews.
- Spend way more time on the UX piece. That way the design of the UI would be better informed and it would lead to a much better end product.
- Have 3 usability tests so that the product can be tested for practicality.
Looking back, I learned that the solution to the problem I originally stated is not a streaming service. If I gave more time to the project, I would definitely switch up my solutions.
Thanks for reading!
