Website

Project: Indiemusic Sales Tracker Website Role: All research, Testing, Wireframing, Prototyping, and Final Design Duration: June-August 2025 (6 weeks)

Indiemusic Sales Tracker Website is a compaion to the Indiemusic Sales Tracker App that alows users to easily scan sales items at shows using a phone's built in camera. While the phone app is designed for ease of use in real world situations, the website is designed to allow for more in depth and detailed management and viewing of sales data to aid indie rock bands with sales management, tour booking, and accounting tasks once a tour has completed. Though the main function of the mobile app is easily scanning sales items with the fewest steps, this functionality makes not sense in a desktop version. Therefor the web version emphasizes deeper functions of the "STATS" view and puts other functions such as adding items, events, fans, and locations front and center.

CHALLENGES

Extended Functionality for adding items: The web version has much more detailed functionality for adding sales items, events, locations, and fans as a primary function of the design. The web version allows for adding notes and uploading images so that users will have more visual cues while interacting with the app on the road

Remembering Fans: The website allows for more detailed notes about individual fans. This can be useful when trying to remember specific opportunities to promote future shows such as radio spots, house parties, and opportunities to sell merch locally through local shop owners.

Adding Data: Adding data is a primary function of the web app rather than just a hidden function. Lists of sales items, events, and locations are readily accessible for browsing and editing and can be sorted and filtered in different ways.

Sales Data is Confusing: Though there are many added features for viewing data, the web app still strives for an ease of use so that data is presented in a straightforward way. In this case, the more advanced features allow for more detailed filtering and sorting of data so that users can quickly identify the hottest locations for ticket and merch sales on a prior tour as well as view markets that need some work.

RESEARCH

Research for this app built on the research done on the mobile app and draws from the same set of interviews and empathy maps. The primary questions we asked for this reasearch were:

Who are our primary users?

What do our primary users need most?

What Challenges could we face moving forward?

Are there gaps or opportunity for improvement with current services?

I re-visited my two personals, Danny and Kelly. For the web app, I focused more on Kelly as a busy person with limited time for managing the band's affairs and tried to organize the webiste in a way that would get her to completing her tasks in the simples and most efficient way possible.

Danny Eiselman

Bass Player/Bartender, age 24

Kelly Hawkins

Lead Singer/mother of 3, age 38

Danny is a bass player in a band who needs an app that allows him to quickly and easily scan sales items at shows while on tour because they don’t have a tour manager who can take care of this and he is in charge of sales after shows.

Kelly is a mother of three kids and lead singer in a band who needs a platform that helps her quickly track the band’s physical and digital sales by geographic location because she needs to be selective about where she books shows and focuses their marketing budget, all while raising three kids!

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.

INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

WIREFRAMES

LOW-FI PROTOTYPE

I created a low fi-prototype that featured the main functionality and navigation. I also created cross platform functionality for phones and i-pads to give a sense of different layouts, but this was more for my own practice. Only the desktop version was tested with a few target users

USER TESTING AND ITERATION

After creating a Low Fidelity Prototype from our Wireframes, I designed a six prompt, un-moderated usability test that focused on navigation. This test resulted in the following takeaways:

Locations tabs confusing

In an attempt to add more detail to the STATS view, I included more tabs for locations which confused users. This should be built in to other ways of viewing stats

STATS function Confusing

Just like in the mobile version, users were confused by the lack of interactivity of the graph with only two mockup views, and no ability to click buttons in the various filters.

Venues tab inconsistent with web app and filters in stats view

Some users who had interacted with the mobile version of the app already questioned the wisdom of having "Venues" as a tab and not including it as a sub category of "Locations". This made me realize that a kind of card sorting exercise to help sort the various ways of thinking of "Location" (event, venue, city, state, country) might be necessary before creating the next iteration.

Low Task Completion

Users consistently expressed tasks being "easy to complete" when they did not complete the tasks at all. A lack of functional filtering in the STATS view, and other "dead ends" that were not yet functioning in this low-fi prototype actually made this confusing. Again, tailoring task in low-fi prototyes towards simple navigational tasks to make sure getting from place to place is easy might be enough for a low-fi user test

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 colors and fonts used in the web app design match the design of the web app for familiarity. Though the desktop app would be used at home on a larger screen, having the look and feel be simiar between apps will reduce cognitive load when using both.

Simplificaion of Main STATS Filters with functional graph

Though it is still a prototype, making something "change" when Items and Location filters are selected helped user understand the intended functionality. I also replaced the complex "Location" tabls in the overlay with additional filtering and sorting options. Though the graph does not respond to the additional filter or sorting options, it was clear to users that this would be a useful additional funtcion.

Replaced "Venues" with "Locations"

By making venues a sub-category of Locations, this helps to increase consistency with the mobile app while still adding more detailed STATS viewing to the web app

More Cues for Task Completion

Simply finishing the prototype with more feedback incresed task completion. Adding more functioning buttons also helped users realize when they were going in the wrong direction.

MAIN CHALLENGES

Extended functionality for adding items and data: By pre-creating an event, users can scan multiple items that will automatically be associated with that event, venue, and location as well as quickly adding basic fan information using the mobile app.

Remembering Fans: More detailed information about fans like notes will allow users to not only recall specific fans and what they bought, but also if there were any important takeaways or opportunities presented while getting to know them.

Sales Data is Confusing: Sales data is presented in a simplified way with limited parameters that relate

Adaptive Designs and Accessibility considerations

I also create adaptive layouts for the home page and added annotations with headers and labels for the final design

TAKEAWAYS

In the process of creating the web app, I actually came up with insights that re-informed the design of the mobile app. Even though they serve different primary functions, it was not until considering the information architecture of the web app that I decided to update the mobile app to allow for adding and editing items. Though I was trying to keep the mobile app more streamlined, it occurred to me that users may need to add events and locations when setting up events on the road and might not have time to get out their laptops. The web app still provides more options when setting up and editing individual fans, events, items, and locations so that users can get these things setup in advance or update after the fact.

Though I wanted to give enough functionality in the prototype's "STATS" view that tasks would make sense to users, I conceed that I hit my limit on actually creating a fully functional Database in Figma. I feel that at some point in the iteration process, I would want to include programmers with experience in managing databases and integrating them into prototypes to test the fully functional database. This could result in further insights on how to organize the data visuall and might open new windows that could leverage existing mental models established by other apps.

To see the full prototype, click the link below

PROTOTYPE