" How tech-enabled approaches can be utilized to create empowering solutions to promote nonconformity and celebrate authentic selves? "

Background

In the spring of 2022, I participated in the Wellesley College Designathon to gain my first hands-on experience in UX Design. I learned a lot from workshops and teammates, and became more passionate about designing applications.

Mission

My team and I wanted to create an app that would empower local music artists from underprivileged backgrounds and help break barriers of pursuing a music career.

Preview

Find Concerts

Create Events

Discover Artists

Solution

UHear is a mobile app that allows artists promote their music for free by creating a public profile with snippets of their songs and creating events for their upcoming concerts.

User Analysis

Thanks to our geographic location, one of the team members was able to go to the Berklee College of Music campus to interview students in-person and online via forms. Our team gathered that:

Effects of the Pandemic

🔴 Pain Point:
Music artists' growth has been slowed and even prevented by the COVID-19 pandemic.

🔵 Insight:
Music artists need a platform where they can grow their audience.

Financial Circumstances

🔴 Pain Point:
Low-income individuals are more likely to have a harder time growing their following in the industry due to having more work and responsibilities than more privileged individuals who can focus solely on music. The lack of financial resources puts small low-income indie artists at a disadvantage compared to more financially stable artists.

🔵 Insight:
Music artists need a low-cost or free options to promote themselves and their music.

Ideating

We began brainstorming and gathered different posters and screenshots of different planners/calendars for inspiration.
‍

Key Features

Based on user interviews, we determined 4 key features:
‍

Explore

Users can filter through and find events

Add Event

If users want to promote their concerts, they can add events publicly for others to see

My Events

Users can see a list of the events they are going to

Profile

Users can create a public profile and link their social media as well as attach snippets of their music

Wireframe Prototype

Usability Testing

Heuristic Evaluation

The Wellesley Design-a-thon offered teams different time slots with industry professionals to obtain feedback. We talked with and showed our design to 2 industry professionals. They gave us advice on both the visuals and the functionality of the app.

Fake Events

⚠️ Issue
Users can create fake events for musicians.
✨ Improvement
Added a notifications tab that notifies musicians what events were created for them. There, they can choose whether to approve the event or not; if the event is fake and the artist does not approve it, it will not appear on the explore tab.
‍

Adding Events

⚠️ Issue
Some fields were too small for users to tap on. There was not enough information requested to create events. Some descriptions for actions, such as "Event Details" were too broad.
✨ Improvement
Users now need to enter more information about events to make them more descriptive, descriptions for actions became more detailed, thus clearer, and fields for information became larger and the same size.

Before
‍

After
‍

Finding Concerts

Users can find concerts, filtering by location, time, genre, and recency. There are 2 ways users can find events: using a map or a list. The map shows where the user is currently located and artists playing as round icons. Users can open the map in full view to access all the concerts nearby. The list gives an option to find concerts without any visuals, making it more accessible to users with poor internet connection as they still would be able to see what events they can attend.
‍

Creating Events

Music artists can create events to reach a wider audience and promote their music.
‍

Final Prototype

Discovering Artists

A lot of users browsing through events might be unfamiliar with artists playing as the app is targeted towards new and less-known musicians. Thus, users can tap on "See artist" to become acquainted with artists: they can read musicians' short bio, play their music, and follow them on social media. This also allows musicians gain a larger following.

‍

Thoughts

Participating in the Wellesley College Designathon was a transformative experience for me. It was not only my first designathon but also my debut into the world of UX design. Overcoming specific challenges, such as addressing the fake events issue and revising the user interface for event creation, taught me the importance of iterative design and user feedback. I learned how to translate user needs into actionable design solutions and balance functionality with intuitive usability. The feedback from industry professionals was extremely valuable, guiding us to refine our design and address critical issues. This experience reinforced my passion for UX design and solidified my commitment to pursuing it as a career.