TunedIn

TunedIn is your one stop to find local venues, discover local artists, buy merch, and share your local favorites with friends in Santa Cruz. We wanted to make a space for Santa Cruz residents to be able to come together and revolve around music in a low stress, highly aesthetic environment. Linking your Spotify and having the ability to put your SoundCloud music onto your profile lets the user share their musical preferences and allows for the computer system to generate a list of music artists that user may like. The music synced from Spotify would notify user of local concerts featuring their favorite artists.

Winter 2018

Role: UX Designer, User Researcher
Members: Greg Wolff, Spencer Butterfield, Emma Seligson
Type of Work: User Experience, Product Design
Tools Used: Balsamiq 3, Sketch

Why Santa Cruz?

Santa Cruz has all the qualities of a successful music destination because of central locations such as The Catalyst and The Rio which are venues that offer well known and rising artists to perform. In addition to these music venues, there are a large number of local musical artists as well as music shops that are cast to the side and foreshadowed by the large scale venues.

The stakeholders for this website are the local artists, the local shop owners, and the people of Santa Cruz looking for an easier way to access local venues and shows. The goal of the website is to relieve some of the stress that goes into finding live entertainment in Santa Cruz

I led and facilitated group discussion to brainstorm what we wanted this website to portray. Here I listed out the features we thought were most meaningful for the project. I then created a user-profile to better understand potential needs.

Requirements and Goals

Easy flowing website that helps to make the community of Santa Cruz come together around music. This includes easier access to all the local events as well as highlighting local music shops and artists. The website should give the user the ability to create a profile, link their Spotify to their profile, give them the ability to search for artists or genres they like, discover new artists, request artist to come to Santa Cruz, look for music lessons, and look for local merch.

iterative design

lo-fidelity

User testing of our designs was performed with local students we found who showed interest in music and fit within our 18-28 age range. We had sat with them and discussed what our website is, and highlighted the features we though would be important to them. We then asked a series of questions about what they would like to see in a website for discovering new bands and local concerts. From there we presented them with interactive PDF mockups that they could navigate.

Research method

For our wireframe mockup user testing sessions, we used the IDEO “Fly on the wall” method, so that we could observe how users interacted with our prototype without the worry of influencing their actions.

Hi-Fidelity

The website was designed in Sketch and highlights the Santa Cruz community as a hub for music. It seeks to brings venues, artists, and local shops together into one website.

Based on the feedback we received for our interactive wireframe from test users, we need to focus the website to take into account musicians hoping to promote their own music. Currently the platform is too focused on content discovery and down not fully satisfy our goal of having a fully fledged music discovery platform for Santa Cruz locals, along with an advertising platform that allows for local artists to gain popularity.

We recognize that the desire that locals wanted of this website was to have more agency as a local artist growing an audience than catering to larger name performers who were only visiting the city for a short duration. Allowing for a more personal experience than SoundCloud to have their music on display with opportunity for growth.

Conclusion

TunedIn was aimed to allow Santa Cruz locals to discover new music, find local concerts, and purchase merchandise on a single website. Each aspect of the site has been influenced either by a competitor application or user requirements. We wanted to include the features that applications like BandsInTown and Soundcloud have to offer, including concert advertisements and music discovery. Having merchandise available for purchase is unlike any of the other popular music sites, giving TunedIn a step-up from other competitors. Using TunedIn, a user may discover their new favorite artists and then easily be able to find local concerts and purchase merchandise to support them.