UX research for a music festival app(a Capstone Project and an Interaction Design Course)
As a music festival lover living right in the center of Europe, I have been always open to attend to music festivals on any place that I can reach easily by bus, train or even plane. That means for me any European country. I’ve attended to music festivals in Germany, Austria, Spain, Portugal and Sweden already. But unfortunately it is quite hard to know, find and track all music festivals happening in such a big extension. It takes time and effort and not everybody is interested in spending their time doing that research. Right now, in 2016, there is no app and no updated website that offers that type of information.
Professionally, I recently switched jobs from graphic designer to interaction designer. My goal is to get better and better in the UX field. That’s why I’ve been studying this Interaction Design Specialisation that Coursera added to their platform last year and gave me the chance to make that change. When I learnt I would be making a final project for the course, I was excited to develop the idea a little further as this one has been in my head for quite some time already. I didn’t know by then, but this is what can be called a “user need”.
I decided to verify if that was a problem for other people too. By conducting interviews I found out that despite the answer was yes, most of the people find the bands attending secondary (the don’t have to really love them). Being with their friends was the primary reason why they would attend to a specific music festival. That put me in the direction of thinking that the social component should be as important or even more as the bands playing.
The first step was making initial storyboards with possible scenarios like the one described and problems that people might have. Paper prototypes with screens solving those problems came afterwards. They are extremely useful when you are trying to decide how the user flow should be.
I translated those to digital mockups. I started developing two different versions in parallel of a possible app. The user would be able to track artists and friends so the app can suggest you which music festivals you might be interested in, but one of the versions would focus more on the music festivals your friends are interested in going, rather than making you suggestions based on your music taste.
Thanks to the Heuristic Valuation given by a fellow UX designer, I discovered that the onboarding area of the app should be quite relevant as that’s the entry point where the user would like to add the bands they would like to see live and connect the account with any social media account that the user uses. That area should be quite straight forward. At this point, both versions were combined into one and I had to dismiss some ideas to keep it as simple as posible. Product managers tend to talk about a minimum viable product (MVP) and as I wouldn’t be able to code anything, I had to stick with that idea.
The Digital Prototype
After thinking on the whole app structure, it was time to start building up the digital prototype. The goal was to test it with people. I decided to use Axure for that, as it’s a program that I am already using it for work. It would take me less time to build if I already know the tool. By using Axure and the Wizard-of-Oz technique where the prototype simulates it’s working but it’s actually not, I was ready for the next step: testing the idea with real users.
I had the chance to test it with two types of users: one that finds the festival where the group will go and one that would go where all his friends are planning to attend no matter what bands are playing. The feedback was quite good as it made me learn one of the most relevant thing of the app, the option to follow bands, wasn’t self explicative and needed a different copy.
Another piece of feedback that I got was related to the social part of the app. I thought it would be nice to have a chat option for all users attending to each specific festival. It can be used to share info, sell tickets, share a car or simply talk about the bands playing. This button was somehow misleading, as the users who tested the app thought that chat was among their friends only, rather than any person attending to the festival.
In order to verify if that was the same thought for other people, I conducted an A/B test with a different approach for the chat, adding a better copy to explain what that chat was about. My initial bet was there wasn’t a statistically significant difference between A and B and my hypothesis was I would get zero clicks in the chat button on both cases.
The results verified my guessing. The users didn’t really have a problem with that area of the app but with the onboarding, as they didn’t expect something like that once they have started the app for the first time.
After fixing a couple of other details, the prototype was done and ready. You can get an idea about the app by checking this video that I made. It includes the user need, and how the app helps people that enjoys music festivals as much as me.
