The Task:

Our task was to envision a way for fans and artists to connect seamlessly and efficiently. Currently, artists need a central place to announce, share, and excite their fans and fans need a place where they have community, connect, and thrive. Our goal is to bring top fans to the artist by being able to have listening parties, drop early access tickets, and share videos/photos within the community.

My Role: Lead Product Designer

We worked in sprints: (1) Stakeholder interviews (2) Brand Strategy (3) App Architecture (4) Wireframing & Features  (5) Brand identity / Look & Feel (6) High-Fidelity Presentation. I led the UX strategy and stakeholder interviews and helped with the brand identity.  I created an asset library for wireframeing and delivered high-fidelity designs to the clients and annotations explaining our design decisions. 

(1) Stakeholder interviews & Market Audit

We conducted research by interviewing stakeholders within the company, musicians, and entrepreneurs who understand and are part of the music industry. We discovered that people's main concern is that platforms like Spotify, SoundCloud, and Ticketmaster do not enable artists to connect with their fans in a humanistic way.

Market Audit 

We abserved apps such as Clubhouse, Reddit, Twitch, Kickstater, Patreon and Onlyfans

The focus was to see how these other companies connect with fans and contributors. How these apps function and how we can see the user's behavior.

(3) Brand Strategy & Principles

Our 5 key takeaways were: 

(1) Make their day: Give fans something to look forward to.

(2) Balance the expected, with the unexpected: Content drops that give excitement to fans. 

(3) Bigger than ourselves: Creating community and bringing people together.

(4) Feeling at home: App & Marketing needs to feel unique/ownable/on-brand for the artist.

(5) Help artist thrive: Use our expertise to position them for success.

(3) App Architecture

Building from interviews, competitor audits, and directional cues from notes and feedback that came from our client; we have produced an app architecture and wireframes.

(4) Wireframes & Features

We created two sets of wireframes, one for the artist and one for the fan. Each persona had a different experience using the app. The artist has the capability to upload videos and photos, as well as create 'drops' for going live or releasing tickets to events. The fan persona could explore artists and subscribe to them.

After synthesizing both the market landscape and stakeholder interviews, we identified key features for the app. The main goal was to build a community similar to what Twitch and Patreon currently offer. We devised a subscription model to provide artists with income and motivate them to post and share with their fans. Additionally, we wanted to create a thread for fans to connect with other fans and build a community similar to Reddit. The 'drops' feature would host new releases of any type of artist content (audio, visual, etc.) and let fans see upcoming drops the artist has in store.. 

(5) Brand Identity / Look & Feel 

(6) High-Fidelity Presentation

Since Launch 

When designing for Giant, we designed an MVP 1 and the future MVP.  We selected key features that would be out for the first launch. One of the most successful features since the launch is "drops" which notifies the user when the artist will be on Giant to play live and new music to the fans and community. The user can go into these rooms where you can see your avatar and participate with other fans. You can also match donations and send money fast with Apple Pay. 

Our Goal was to find a way to have a strong community and give back to the artists we love. With this feature, we created just that. 

Alanna Fein/ the creative chicken