RJam. hub for local musicians - a UX Case Study

“I thought to leave a note on the message board in the office. But I could not do that. I thought maybe open mics can work, but for an introvert that was a hard thing, I couldn’t try. I wished there had been some easier way to find folks to jam with.”

These are the words of one of my interviewees who is an amateur/semi-professional singer who moved from her home country at the age of 29. She is looking for an interaction platform for local musicians to accomplish her passion in life, singing.

She inspired me to create RJam.

Background:

Our first project, Rapid Prototyping.

We had only 10 days, from start to finish. We should come up with a problem after understanding user needs, a solution to that problem and finally the lo-fi clickable prototype.

Our client is Raytown Productions. Wants to grow services through the creation of a community engagement or audio mixing app.

Problem:

Amateur, local musicians need a way to interact easily with other local musicians living in their neighborhood/city because they want to find people to jam with.

Solution:

RJam app allows local musicians to make a location-based musician search and to interact with them easily. This enables the users to match easier and have jam sessions together.

Features:

• Location-based. The app will allow users search by location (city, neighborhood, zip code) so that musicians will be able to see other players around them.
• Search, View, Listen. Users will be able to search for musicians by instruments or categories, be able to view their profiles with their experiences and also be able to listen to their samples.
• Get in contact. Users will be able to get in contact easily with the potential musicians they like without leaving the app and without sharing their emails or phone numbers in the very first sight.
• Message board. Users will also be able to post their classified apps into the message board, which will allow them to spend less time instead of having a deep research in the app and to get as much as responses to their needs.

Research:

I conducted 6 interviews with mostly young and early-mid age people. 1 had no experience in making music, other 5 were either singer or an instrument player.

My questions were going from broad to narrow:

• What is your relationship to music?
• Have you played any instrument or made music?
• What difficulties have you experienced while making music?
• How do you search for new people to play together?

At the end, I started grouping my notes from interviews into categories. There were 5 sub categories under the main “Playing” category: disadvantages of distance, lack of local interaction, better experience with a band, difficulty in finding fellow musicians and different ways to meet with other local players.

Actually all 5 had some kind of relation to one another and they were actually pointing to the same direction. The message was that there are many local musicians out there who do not want to make music alone but are unaware of one another. Those people who can not reach out to others easily for playing together start losing their motivation and give up on making music.

Interviewees told about their experiences. When a group member quits the band, for instance, they say that it gets really painful to find a new member. This also occurs for temporary situations, when a group member gets sick just before a gig. Or there are people who move to new cities or countries where they can not easily get into the local music community.

“Once we had a guitarist quit the band. And there had been some other cases where one of our group members gets sick just before a gig. What do you do? You must find someone right away who is familiar with your music and songs.”

Design:

I created my user flow, thinking of the steps that a user will take after downloading the app and I started with my first sketches.

User Flow:

Sketches:

This first iteration focused on the main feature of location-based musician search. The feedbacks I got were about including a favorite musicians section, additional sorting options and having an explanation of the app for the first users who do not know about the app.

Wireframes:

Including these feedbacks, I iterated my app. In the 2nd run of feedbacks, I received a key suggestion, which formed one of the main features of the app, the message board. Incorporating the message board section, I finalized my clickable prototype in Balsamiq:

How does RJam help:

RJam does not only suggest to you the potential singers and musicians around you, but also allows you to get in contact easily and expand your musical network. Or do you have a vacant spot in your band? Fill it by having a deep dive on the app or just post a classified ad on the message board. No one can know where a single chat message could take you to.

Reflections:

This was my first UX project and it was amazing how fast the process flowed, every phase feeding to the next one. I started the project with nothing at hand, and at the end of 10 days, I had a defined problem, a solution, tons of work, sleepless nights and finally a clickable prototype. But the most fascinating part of this experience was to understand how you get a chance to touch on people’s lives. Imagining the projects to come, I realize that we, UX designers, have the opportunity to listen to people to understand their needs and try to fulfill them, whatever the magnitude or importance. You do not know how many people there are out there that you will touch with the designs you will create.