The Project
Musicians' Hub is a mobile application aimed at assisting musicians, venues, recording studios, and producers in connecting with each other. This captures a number of needs in the music industry such as band organization, booking, fan base growth, recording, and community building.
Need Finding Research
Early in my career I remember asking a Sr. UX designer how to make my portfolio truly stand out. Before I could even finish the question he looked me in the eye and said, “need finding.” Need finding is observing and talking with people to learn about, well, their needs. It should happen before anything else when designing for the users’ experience. What does it matter if an app has an incredible user experience if nobody actually needs or finds it useful? It seems obvious but somehow this step is frequently skipped.
I knew I wanted to design an app to help up-and-coming musicians somehow, so I got to work on need finding. One of the trickiest parts about Need finding research is seeing beyond what the user is saying. It requires both interviewing and observational research. Luckily musicians love attention and I happen to be one myself, so the observational part wasn’t too bad. My heavy involvement Provo’s music community (spawning ground to the likes of Imagine Dragons and Neon Trees) proved to be incredibly helpful as I ran a successful recording studio, hosted a YouTube channel consisting of live sessions and artist interviews, managed Provo’s premiere music publication, and fronted a band of my own. Hipster kid through and through I suppose.
With all of my “street smarts” in hand, I crafted a survey based on the troubles I commonly saw in the scene and sent it out through my music publication. I intentionally left the questions very open-ended, allowing respondents to talk openly about their music-related needs without leading them to preconceived answers. Despite the free-form nature of the survey, the results actually indicated some very prominent trends.
Needfinding Analysis
It became pretty clear that networking and promoting were the main categories of concern. I dug deeper into both the survey results and my observations over the years to craft this list of needs:
Networking
New musicians need a way to easily connect with other musicians who share the same ideals, goals, and musical direction so they can organize an effective band.
Nearly half of the survey responses talked about this struggle. I can’t count how many times I’ve been to a concert where the opening band clearly didn’t have that synergy yet and their music suffered for it. I’ve experienced this pain point myself as well.
New and established musicians alike need a way to network with other bands and venues without a culture of competitiveness, toxicity, and lack of genuineness so that artists within the same industry can establish mutually beneficial relationships.
Over half of the responses talked about toxic competitiveness in the local music community. It’s kind of funny if you think about it. If everyone who complained about it wasn’t competitive themselves, wouldn’t the probably go away? Existential questions aside, I’ve had many experiences with fellow musicians who, whether they intended to or not, let their ego get in the way and built a rift between themselves and other artists through competitive attitudes and insincerity.
All musicians share a goal of recording their music (go figure). Many of them however aren’t sure where to start or which step to take next.
I witnessed this a lot as a studio owner so it was good to confirm my suspicions in this survey. Nearly everyone talked about recording and a large majority mentioned they weren’t sure where to start - whether that be which studio to go to, how to save up enough money to record, etc.
Promoting
Musicians need a way to clearly and effectively advertise online. Social media platforms are the main source of marketing, and too frequently musicians feel that their online growth is ineffective and too slow.
Musicians need a way to spend less, and make more. The sad truth is that music is not a lucrative pursuit for most people.
Musicians need an effective way to break out of their local scene and reach a broader audience.
Red Route Analysis
The list of needs I developed was pretty eclectic, so I ran a red route analysis to determine which needs were most pressing and had the greatest opportunity for growth.
This is really the point where my app started taking form. I realized there isn’t a good solution out there for finding band mates, especially for the average hobbyist. Sure, people meet band mates in music school or by hosting auditions; but what about the average Joe who picked up guitar in his free time and is itching to play with a group? A “looking for recommendations” post on Facebook can only take him so far.
Musicians need an app that connects them with like-minded musicians so they can build their dream band. Or at least find a group of friends who will rock out with them in their garage while they smash a cow bell.
User Stories
With the fog clearing and an app idea forming, I wrote related user stories to begin designing the app:
As a front-man (current or aspiring), I want to find like-minded musicians with whom I can organize a band.
As a front-man (current or aspiring), I want to quickly get an idea of musicians’ play styles and interests so I can determine if I want to contact them to join my band.
As a front-man (current or aspiring), I want to showcase my band’s music and my interests so like-minded musicians can find and contact me.
As a musician, I want to find a band to play in that matches my musical interests and goals.
As a musician, I want to quickly get an idea of bands’ styles and goals so I can determine if I want to join their band.
As a musician, I want to show other musicians my musical skills, styles, and interests so like-minded bands can find and contact me.
The more I got into the user stories, the more I realized something: this app would basically be a dating app for musicians. From a UX perspective, Jakob’s Law states that since users spend most of their time on other apps, they prefer your app to work the same way as the ones they already know. So with all of the research and work I did, I arrived at Tinder. For musicians.
Now of course there are some huge differences. Users aren’t looking for love, they’re looking for band mates. So the user profile is going to be much different from what you’d see on Tinder. Musicians care far less about your favorite food or your glamour profile picture and far more about how good you are at your instrument(s) of choice. The swipe up or down is going to be based on how well you shred, not how well you flirt.
So yeah, I guess I could get behind that.
With this key difference in mind, I formulated a list of the what to include in a musician’s profile.
Demos (video or audio) of the musician
Name
Age
Location
Gender
Personal bio including things like what genre(s) they want to play, favorite artists, past experience
List of instruments
Interested in a band that is… (professional, hobbyist, jam, etc)
All of these data points will streamline the experience, helping users find band mates quickly. This brings into light another point. If this app does what it’s intended to do, hopefully users don’t need to use it more than a few times. It’s sort of like a resume that you only need to use and update when you’re looking for a job. Once you’ve got the job (i.e. found a band) you don’t need to revisit it until you’re looking for a new gig. This fundamental principle means that the app needs to be as simple and minimal as possible. In & Out.
User Flow
After iterating on what began as a rather clumsy user flow, I refined and created this much smoother first pass at the app’s user flow: