Scene

A new app design for discovering underground, live music in NYC while providing a customized source for information.

Client

Personal Project

Team

Ryan Massenzio, Ayman Alajati

Role

UX Researcher, UX Designer, UI Designer

Results

Designed in two one week sprints. Positive feedback from usability testing. 100% of users tested said they would use it.

Methods

User Interviews, Affinity Mapping, Persona Development, Journey Mapping, Competitive Analysis, Competitive Matrix, Comparative Feature Analysis, Moscow Map, Design Studio, Wireframes, Rapid Prototyping, Iterative Testing

Challenge

My team and I were curious to learn more about how residents in NYC navigate all of the various cultural experiences the city has to offer. This lead us to learning the value locals see in the smaller, more intimate events that take place constantly, but are difficult to keep track of.

These are often specific to live music.

NYC locals are interested in attending more of these small and sometimes free events, but have too many sources for information that tend to get cluttered with things that don’t align with their interests.

Solution

A native mobile app to help NYC residents discover intimate live music.

It will provide one place for people to discover small, affordable events that are difficult to find, based on their music preferences. They will be able to receive notifications and reminders based on what they are interested in.

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Applying User Research

We began by targeting users who were NYC residents seeking to discover new experiences.

After conducting surveys and interviews, we gained some insight that pointed us in the direction of live music. In particular, small venues featuring up and coming artists or small shows featuring a favorite artist.

Key Findings

Our users prefer intimate venues.
They don’t like searching through options and need information customized to their interests.
They want to know more about the small and sometimes free events that take place in their neighborhoods and they need one place to find this information.

Users often make last minute plans and usually start searching for things to do on the weekend, towards the end of the week, or even the day of.
They tend to miss events due to lack of information or reminders.

Identifying the User

Mapping the User Journey and Discovering Opportunities

Problem Statement

NYC is always offering a variety of small, local and sometimes free music events. These can be difficult to find due to lack of advertising.

Billie wants to attend more of these events but never has time to plan for them and feels overwhelmed when trying to filter through the bigger, more expensive concerts. How might we help them stay informed of these smaller, more intimate experiences while keeping them notified of what’s important to them.

Discovering Opportunities

After laying out our competitors, it was clear that by focusing on intimate underground events, specific to music, our app would fill a gap in the market while meeting our users needs .

Sifting Through Features

We conducted a competitive/comparative analysis to gain a better understanding of how we could stand out and provide features that aren’t currently being offered. Interest selection stood out as the most important, which supported our target audiences need for a customized experience.

Proposed Partnership

Bandcamps mission is to support up and coming musicians by providing information about them to the public.

This aligns with our mission to provide a source for Billie to discover intimate music events. These events very often support new artists and it would benefit Bandcamp to use our platform as a source for keeping users informed about shows.

Prioritizing Features

Using a Moscow Map, we put our heads together to define what features we must include, should include and won’t include. This was followed by a design studio where we pulled as many ideas as we could from each other to create one strong concept.

We felt that the most important aspect to focus on was giving users the ability to customize their experience. This way they would have a convenient source for information based on their interests as well as an ease of organizing that information so that they avoid missing out on events they would enjoy.