CHALLENGES

1.  Tracking Sales at Venues:  Artists find it difficult to keep track of merch sales while on the road.  The merche table is often were artists get to know their audiences and it is hard to take care of business at the same time.  

2.  Remembering Fans:  It is easy to strike up a conversation with a fan after a show but hard to get their contact info.  This app should make it easy to remember fans whether they purchase merch or not.  

3.  Adding Data:  Most apps don’t let you add sales items, locations, events, or individual fan information and only pull download and streaming data from major online platforms.  It is hard to tell what geographic locations to hit.

4. Sales Data is Confusing: Most apps display sales data in complex ways that might make sense to a business or accounting professional but is very abstract for a musician.  Artists need an easy way to sort sales data by geobraphic location in order to identify markets where they are hot

RESEARCH

Though I had my own ideas of what might help artist as a former touring musician, I did not want my own biases to dictate the design so  I interviewed several touring musicians to identify common pain points when trying manage their sales while touring.  Because it was important to focus on the experience of “indie” rock bands, I stuck with local musicians who were not affiliated with major labels. Having identified the important pain points, I did a competitive analysis, to see how the industry currently addresses those pain points and found there were some major gaps for these kinds of artists.  Our research asked the following questions:

From interviews with musicians, we found that there were two main frustrations.  First, peeping track of sales and organizing sales data is quite difficult in the context of. show.  After a show, the band is under pressure to get their gear off stage, talk with fans, and deal with other business in an environment that is both loud and dark.  They need a tool that can automatically scan sales items, adding metadata like location and venue as well as easily addiing info about the fan who purchased the items.  Second, data in other platforms can be complex to interpret and is designed for accounting and marketing professionals.  Artists at this stage need to know how well they did at each concert, venue, and location, so they can more efficiently book tours that focus on their most popular markets, and to market to locations that need work.  Having a way to veiw sales statistics in a way that focuses on these more important elements for a fledgling band could help artists do the business side of things more effectively.    These findings are expllifed in two user personas, Danny and Kelly.  

After identifying our users pain points, we searched the current state of the field to see if there were already apps out there that served them.  We found serveral products that do sales tracking, however, the almost exculsively focus on digital platforms.  

All of these platforms have functionality issues that include ambiguous functionality of icons and buttons, difficulty setting up accounts, and a lack of functioning trial so a user can try it out.  However the main gaps these platforms leave is that none have functionality for scanning live sales or entering individual pieces of merchandise as they are completely focused on digital platforms.  This leaves a few great opportunity to create an app that fills these gaps including

• The ability to easily scan sales items with information about the event, venue, and location as well as fan data

• An app that has a fully functional "trial" so that users can feel comfortable with the process

• An easy way to add individual items including physical media, poster, t-shirts, and other merchandise

• A simple display to view sales data that can easily be filtered by items, locations, and timeframes with the ability to sort the data by geographic location, venue, or item. 

USER TESTING AND ITERATION

After creating a Low Fidelity Prototype from our Wireframes, we designed an eight prompt, un-moderated usability test followed by an eight question survey that asked for ratings and feedback.  From these tests, we came up wtih the following insights:  

To address these issues, I re-thought the layout and added some extra functionality to the finished prototype so that it was more obvious when a task was completed and so users could acatully select itmes, locaitons, and adjust the view using intetrated tabs that were more descriptive of the function

DESIGN SYSTEM

The bright, simple color pallate and font layout for the app are intended to give users a very high contrast and clarity to help with task completion in dark rooms where darker backgrounds with light writing will not show up well.  As users will be using the app in dark night clubs, it is essential that they have the best chance of seeing what they are doing without having to fumble or squint.  The simplistic layout of the app also serves this purpose.  

IMPROVEMENTS

TAKEAWAYS

This experience taught me several things.  Though I have created my own digital musical instruments and engaged in usability studies and re-designs for a target audience of experienced music and dance performers, I was thinking more of their experience performing the instrument and making connections between sound and gesture more than I was thinking about the experience of the user interface for a general group of users.  In other words, my designs have always assumed a certain level of investment on the part of the users to learn how the system worked, so thinking about ways of making it as easy as possible were normally up-staged by the desire to create something that was impressive creatively. In this process, I re-directed some of that creativity into trying to imagine the experience of interacting with the app from the user's perspective.  Instead of prioritizing personal creative desires, I listened to users to understand their needs, and used those needs as my target for the design. 

Though I had done usability studies before, they were generally done for existing websites and apps and never for a prototype I had created.  I think in future before engaging in user testing with general users, I would first run through the test with colleagues, engaging in a heuristic analysis and cognitive walkthrough in order to identify any flaws with the prototype or the test itself that would inhibit gaining real insights.  Another big learning experience for me here was diving fully into Figma.  As a DMI designer, I am used to programs that create fully functional products rather than prototypes and at times, I feel my goals were pretty ambitious for a platform like Figma.  That said, I learned to strike the balance between full functionality and mockup that is necessary for a successful prototype. I realized that functions like full database interaction woud require the intervention of a programmer with database management and integration experience.  I feel that given the lack of this expertise on my team of one, I succeeded in creating a prototype that provided enough user feedback so users could have the expereience of using the app without that full functionality.  In this case, it would likely be necessary to run further testing focused on the database aspect in a final product before releasing the app.    

Because this platform is designed to be accompanied by a more fully functional website, I saved creating the final prototype until after I had created the information architecture and lo-fi prototype of the website as I guess that it would help inform the final design of the app as well.  This strategy paid off as I realized that some of the deeper functionality like creating new items and locations could also quite easily be done on the phone app and would be helpful for a musician without immediate access to a desktop computer.  On the other hand, I also scaled the STATS design on the phone app to keep it more simple as I knew that the web version would include some deeper functionality that would be too complex for the form factor and screen real-estate available on a phone.  

To learn more about the prototype, please follow the link below to test it out for yourself!