Research, Visuals, Interaction.
Dec 2022 (3 weeks)
Storyboarding, conducting interviews, paper and digital wireframing, low and high-fidelity prototyping, conducting usability studies, accounting for accessibility, and iterating on designs.
Musician Network is a social media site for musicians to connect with one another to find bandmates, recording gigs, and people to share or create music with. Musician Network eliminates common social media elements from its platform like follower counts, newsfeeds, and advertisements.
Competitor social media sites have complex navigation and are difficult to use and time consuming for many users.
Design a responsive site that makes the process of finding local musicians fun and stress free.
I conducted interviews and created empathy maps in order to better understand and measure the users’ needs. The interviewees were all working adults who play music professionally and/or for leisure.
My assumptions were that many of the interviewees wanted to be able to find musicians that had similar goals as them. Although the user group confirmed this assumption, they also expressed the need to see if the musicians had open spots in their bands. This way they have an additional way to reach out to the other musicians rather than have to wait for someone to reach out to them.
Sites that have ads and pop-ups are frustrating for users because it interrupts them while they are navigating the site.
When links or sections of sites aren’t functional or are unclear it can make a user’s process difficult.
When there is too much information on a section of the site, it can make a process overwhelming and confusing for users.
It is frustrating for users to not receive technical support when they ask for it.
Emily is a nurse, who needs a way to connect with people that have similar tastes in music, because in doing so she can create new friendships with people that share a similar love for music.
Charlie is a professional musician, who needs a way to connect with other musicians, because in doing so he will be able to experiment playing new musical styles.
In order to create a solid foundation for Musician Network, I searched for the social media sites that musicians use the most to see what user goals these sites weren’t meeting. Many of these competitors have too many steps in their processes of connecting with other musicians. Additionally these platforms are catered to musicians that want to perform music professionally, leaving out musicians that just want to play music for leisure. Musician Network capitalizes on this by encouraging musicians of any skill level to use the platform. This is done by eliminating follower counts for users’ accounts and the ability to post content outside of a user’s own profile. This encourages users to primarily connect with other users of the sites through messaging one another in order to create and share music.
Here I sketched out a few ideas of how I was going to organize the components for my digital wireframes.
This prototype connected the primary user flow of finding musicians, messages, and going to profile pages, so the navigation of the site could be tested in a usability study with users.
This usability study had users test the high-fidelity prototype, with the goal of finding improvements for the site’s information architecture and possible additions of elements that may help the user through different processes on the site.
When customizing your profile, there were limited options for uploading an image to change the profile or cover image. Adding the drag and drop overlay gave users more options for uploading their profile and cover pictures.
On the “Find Musicians” page I added a search bar to help users find specific people on the site, since not having the search function can make it harder to find someone in a large group of users.
Use thoughtful spacing between elements so users know which elements relate to each other, helping make the processes users go through on the site easier.
Use icons to make navigation more clear for users.
The design of this site kept true to the initial goal of making the process of finding like minded musicians. It does this by eliminating the ability to post content outside of a user’s own profile, as well as minimizing interaction between all users’ content outside of the messaging page.
This encourages users to primarily message one another to create or share music, unlike other social media sites that can overwhelm users with too much content to browse through and too many notifications to keep track of.
It can be beneficial for a site or product that lets users interact with other users to include everything the users needs with a minimalistic design. Too much visual information, whether it be an overabundance of posted content, notifications, or colors on a screen, can distract users during the processes on the site.
