Prototyping and refining ideas

Week 7| April 16-April 22

This week we moved from conceptualizing to building more concrete versions of our ideas.

Devika and Steven worked on coming up with wireframes for our app experience while John Walker and Emma explored what the event experience should look and feel like.

Our App

We want our app experience to find music related events relevant to their interests and also allow them to post events and gigs of their own. We explored ways to group and filter information in ways that allow users to find just the events they are interested in without the process becoming too overwhelming.

We also thought through what information might be necessary to provide when creating an event (ex: time, location, age restrictions.)

A wireframe of an event set up page

Our Events

In order to gain a better sense of the types of events musicians might be interested in we created a survey last week and analyzed the results early this week.

Survey results of our event options (on a scale of 1–5, the output misleading makes it appear as thought it’s out of 10.)

Participants seemed to be most interested in events that allowed them to develop their skills (such as open mic nights and workshops) and least interested in events where they might be judged (such as battles or feedback sessions.)

We wanted to storyboard the specifics of an event in order to get more detailed feedback and decided to build out a story for a jam session. We built out 3 scenarios ranging from unstructured, to very structured and curated to get a sense of the feel users might want.

This is our least structured scenario

We are still getting more feedback on our storyboards but so far people seem to want certain elements to be structured (ex: being assigned to a jam group, being told when to switch groups) but want other aspects to be more freeform (ex: choose the type of group you join, deciding who to reach out to afterwards.)

Exploring Music Events in the Real World

Early this week we heard about a local event focusing on a jam session for Appalachian bluegrass music. On Saturday, we attended to get a better understanding of how they ran their jam sessions and how new people joined and found out about the group.

We chatted with a few of the musicians and learned that while anyone is welcome the musicians that attend typically already know each other and not much outreach is done to find new musicians. While this did not allow us to gain much insight into how to structure our event it did validate that there was a gap in the market for our service.