DICE.fm — a UX/UI Concept Project

Implementing a subscription service to a native concert ticketing app.

Overview

The Brief

DICE leadership believes that there is a massive untapped potential in small venues and lesser-known artists, and they want to start exploring that space.

They plan on building a subscription service which will enable users to discover independent artists and attend smaller live shows tailored to their likes and location.

The Team

Arielle Lee, Nicole Espadera, Maria Sogos and Ollie Coppins (me!)

My Role

This was a collaborative project with 3 other UX/UI designers. I took the lead on user research, facilitated the design studio and moderated team discussions before producing a high-fidelity final product.

The Deliverables

Competitive and comparative research, Personas, high-fidelity user flows, reassessment of information architecture, Sketches, grayscale wireframes, iterations on design, interactive high-fidelity prototype for a desktop website

The Outcome

Our solution created a new subscription service to exist within the existing DICE platform that would consist of:

• A new category of live shows on DICE called “Hidden Gems”. Shows in the “Hidden Gems” category would take place once per week and would highlight lesser-known artists that were performing in small venues in the user’s location.
• For a monthly fee subscribers would receive priority access to Hidden Gems gigs, and digital tokens — Gems — that could be exchanged for tickets to these gigs.
• Ticketholders for Hidden Gems gigs would have access to a group chat that enabled them to interact with others attending the gig, and even the artists themselves. This chat would be time boxed, existing only for a window of 48 hours either side of the gig itself, in order to prevent spam messages persisting on users apps.

Discover

Research Plan

We began by devising a broad research plan that sought to understand where we could provide value in the subscription service. Our plan was to utilise:

• Competitive analysis to assess the market and identify features we may wish to include
• User research to understand user motivations in seeing live music.

Competitive Analysis

We first carried out some competitive analysis in order to better understand the existing market, what subscription services exist and what do they offer? We found that the majority of subscription services for live music events are for live-streaming, but did identify 3 companies with subscription services offering tickets to physical gigs:

We found that these ticketing apps didn’t offer subscription services promoting independent artists and small venues, but instead simply offered benefits that catered to fans of large artists such as:

- VIP experience/areas

- Access to premium seats

- Earlybird access to tickets

Screener Survey

As this was a concept project we didn’t have access to existing users of DICE, so we carried out a screener survey in order to find a set of people that could provide relevant insights in user interviews.

We used a Google Form and distributed it through a General Assembly alumni message channel which has a few thousand people on it. We sought to identify people who regularly attended live music shows and had experience of using the DICE app.

User Interviews

From the responses to our survey we identified and interviewed 22 people who had a vested interest in seeing live music. We asked them over 30 questions each as we sought to answer:

The answers returned a wealth of information that took the team a long time to synthesise into insights. Unfortunately it was at this stage that we realised our questions had been far too broad. We had information about the general DICE user, but not about what would represent value in a subscription service targeting fans of small venues and independent artists.

Rather than throwing out all of the work we had done, we created an affinity map with trends identified about the general DICE app experience, and then interviewed 5 more people with a vested interest in small gigs. In this second round of interviews we asked:

Following this second round of user interviews we identified the following key insights:

Define

All of our findings allowed us to refine our initial assumptions and create both a persona and user journey to help visualise our user’s challenges and enable us to better empathise with their problems.

Persona

First we created a persona: Emily is a 27 year old young professional from London that loves the intimate atmosphere of small music venues.

The key points from our research that we wanted to emphasise in this persona are that:

• There is a sense of excitement and discovery attached to seeing live music with smalls artists at independent venues.
• These gigs are typically less well organised and reliable than larger concerts.
• These gigs offer people a chance to connect with like-minded people and potentially talented new artists.

User Journey

We wanted to showcase the positives and negatives of seeing smaller music gigs, and so we used the Emily persona to create the following user journey that highlights her motivations in attending, and the blockers she typically experiences.

Creating this user journey enabled the team to better empathise with Emily’s problems and identify opportunities where features in the subscription service could solve them.

Problem Statement

We were then able to define Emily’s problems in a series of problem statements:

• Emily needs to know whether a show is still on schedule so that she doesn’t waste time going to the venue — covers the problem that smaller gigs tend to be less organised and therefore more unreliable.
• Emily needs to meet like-minded people at gigs so that she does not have to rely on her circle of friends to go with her — connects the problem that it can be difficult to find friends to accompany you to smaller gigs, with the positive that smaller gigs tend to encourage great social interaction among the audience.
• Emily needs to find gigs with small artists so that so that she can find new music and have a unique experience — encapsulates the key positive about smaller gigs, that people like to feel a sense of discovery

We created this last problem statement to encapsulate factors from each of the above:

By choosing a problem statement, we could prioritise design decisions by identifying the most important user needs and pain points.

Develop

Moving on to the second half of the double diamond process, we had our target user and key problems identified and we were ready to move on to the development stage.

Design Studio

We kicked off our idea generation with a design studio centred around 3 How Might We statements, and asked everyone to sketch possible solutions.

We went bold and general with our statements as we wanted to encourage creativity and get a range of different answers. The solutions we came up with were:

Our Solution

Over 3 rounds of design studio we managed to combine several ideas into one coherent vision for the subscription service. The service would consist of:

A new category of live shows on DICE called “Hidden Gems”.

Shows in the “Hidden Gems” category would take place once per week and would highlight lesser-known artists that were performing in small venues in the user’s location.

For a monthly fee subscribers would receive priority access to Hidden Gems gigs, and digital tokens — Gems — that could be exchanged for tickets to these gigs.

Ticketholders for Hidden Gems gigs would then have access to a group chat that enabled them to interact with others attending the gig, and even the artists themselves. This chat would be time boxed, existing only for a window of 48 hours either side of the gig itself, in order to prevent spam messages persiting on users apps.

Once tickets have been purchased, users would be able to view an event tracker on the same pages as the QR code ticket. This would update the user about the time of key moments in the gig, and any delays or changes to the schedule.

Wireflow

We had our ideas, we had our user flow, we were now ready to move on to low-fidelity sketching.

Testing

With our mid-fidelity prototype built, we were able to begin user testing to make sure the subscription would be easy to use. We elected to try using unmoderated user tests on Maze.com for the first time, hoping that this would provide us with a larger feedback sample than we could achieve in the same time frame carrying out moderated tests.

We received 21 responses to our test, which consisted of 5 specific tasks and an open-ended question asking for more general feedback. Unfortunately, participants found the first 2 tasks ambiguously worded, and so they only received a 45 and 31% success rate. These issues perhaps could have been mitigated if we had conducted moderated user tests instead.

Aside from this our participants largely reacted positively to the design, particularly citing the use of the schedule tracker and time-box chat thread as exciting features.

Iteration

Some negative but constructive feedback from the user testing identified a few areas where we could make small changes as we progressed from mid to high fidelity.

Deliver

High Fidelity

Either watch the YouTube video for a demonstration of our final prototype, or click here to access the prototype yourself.

Presentation

We presented all of our work to the class and several instructors who acted as stakeholders critiqued our work.

The feedback on the prototype was largely positive. The class and acting stakeholders all agreed that our proposal answered the brief well, and praised the overall UI, the progress bar on the gig screen and the time boxed chat threads.

The key negative concerned the lack of onboarding for the subscription service, and concerns over how the concept would be communicated to users. This was something that we had hoped to implement, but unfortunately didn’t have time in the 2-week sprint.

Some other criticisms concerned the lack of visibility for the new service on the app’s home page and some of the text potentially being too small.

How we met the brief

DICE were looking to implement a subscription service that enabled users to discover and attend new live shows featuring small bands and independent venues.

Our solution provided users with a curated list of upcoming events in their area, all of which featured small bands and independent venues. The use of tokens would provide subscribers with better value tickets, the time boxed chat threads connects them to both the other audience members and artists.

Conclusion

Next Steps

If we were to continue on with this project, our immediate next step would be to design and implement an onboarding process for the Hidden Gems service. This could in reality consist of its own UX cycle, but other ideas we would have liked to pursue include:

• Add reviews and concert content
• Develop the subscription model further (power users get Gems, exclusive events, etc.)
• Artist or Venue facing version of the app
• Further develop the ability to find new friends to go with (i.e. “Matches” with similar taste)
• Mystery gigs

Key Learnings

Set the research goals carefully — The blockers we experienced in the research phase could have been avoided if we had been more precise with our research goals. We accidentally created a huge affinity with insights into the behaviours of broad music fans, but little insight into the behaviours of small music fans.

I like to facilitate and organise the team — As it was the first group project of our intensive course, I wasn’t sure how teamwork dynamics would affect our output. I was pleasantly surprised to realise I enjoyed the task of organising the group and facilitating our discussions, pushing us toward compromises and decisions.

Competitive Analysis — I have since found 2 other competitors that offer similar subscription services to our Hidden Gems proposal (Jukely and GotoBeat). It’s impossible to say how much our project would have changed if we had identified these companies earlier, but I think it’s important to remember to keep an eye open to the existing market.