Reimagining a music service

Bookabeat is a small business that wants to make it easy for people to get live musical performances into their house parties, weddings, festivals & events. They have a website that shows their line-up of musicians & a form you complete to enquire about booking an artist. That's as technological as it gets. Naomi & Makeda, co-founders of Bookabeat, then scramble back & forth between the customer & artist to get the gig set up.

Customer problem

The current website has a form for customers to complete when booking an artist. What follows is a manual process between the customer and Bookabeat to gather the right information.

The approach

To understand the problem, I:

  1. Interviewed Bookabeat artists and customers;

  2. Developed Personas; and

  3. Created a journey map of the key tasks.

Persona of a musician whose goals and behaviours are unique to this type of user.

Personas

Personas were created to enable me to empathise with the users of Bookabeat. My assumptions were that there were two users: (1) Someone booking an artist, and (2) the artist. Through user research, I uncovered a third user that Bookabeat works closely with— an event co-ordinator.

Three types of users of the platform:

  1. General Public (Harrison)

  2. Events Co-ordinator (Sharon)

  3. Musician (Chantrel)

The personas helped me to convey to Bookabeat design decisions (we did this because this user expects that) and to ensure their needs were considered.

User journey for how a customer would book an artist on the Bookabeat website.

Mapping the journey

I captured the current journey that users and musicians go through to book musicians and contact Bookabeat.

I then had to decide which problems I can solve. I focussed on two:

  1. How might we assure customers of the quality of the artists?

  2. How might we make organising live music simple?

Why?

  • "Live music is expensive" was out of my control. Musicians & Bookabeat agree on & set a price.

  • "Artists are unreliable" was not something I wanted to touch. It would delve into incentives & understanding the motivations of the artist, which I thought I could include in the scope further down the track.

The scope of a solution was limited to digital, so a redesign of the website to capture information and showcase artist performances was agreed by Bookabeat.

Information architecture and site map

Content was re-organised to make it easier for customers to complete common tasks:

  1. Find an artist;

  2. View artist info;

  3. Book an artist;

  4. Contact for support.

Wireframes

I started by building low fidelity wireframes & test them out with Bookabeat. I offered two options based on some of the content they wanted to start including, like upcoming events. I also played around with the idea of guiding users to musicians based on the type of event they wanted the live music for.

I started to build the wireframes out, creating templates for each screen, dummy content & colour. I explored the idea of having three fields at the bottom of the screen that allowed the user to choose a valid city, genre or style as a way to discover the musicians in Bookabeat's portfolio. Each artist had to have sample footage of them performing live, to demonstrate their skill & act to the customer.

Logo refinement

I revisited their logo, providing a smoother & flatter icon. They only had access to .jpeg versions of their logo, so I provided them with a vector file of the new one.

Outcome

A website design was delivered to Bookabeat, with process flows for each task and a revised logo for branding.

The biggest learning from this project was the unstructured nature of a small business. As someone coming in from a large organisation, I had to apply discovery frameworks and document templates in order to capture what I needed.