Project overview
ManageBand is an application supporting musicians in managing their careers. It facilitates organizing creativity, contacts, and tasks to be completed –without the need for having a manager.
My role
In-depth user interviews
Conducting interviews with people from the music industry, note taking, data gathering in figjam.
Analyzing
Card sorting, user personas, problem statement, brainstorming, prioritization with MoSCoW method.
Design
Mockups, prototypes, branding.
testing
Usability testing with clients.
Why and what for?
Based on our own experiences, conversations with artists, and participation in conferences (e.g., Tak Brzmi Miasto), we decided to create a tool that will help musicians find their way in the difficult industry. Playing music is just the beginning. We want to make everything else easier.
There are many applications that can support an artist's musical journey:
- Google Drive – for file management
- Soundcloud – for private track sharing
- Miro – for board planning
- Google Docs – for lyrics, documents, riders, etc.
- And many others...
None of these applications are tailored to musicians. We all know how tedious it is to independently build and manage your own workflow.
Research goal and method
To verify the real needs of musicians and user problems, I decided to conduct research with them. I wanted to make sure that our assumptions about existing needs and pain points of musicians were true. For the research, I decided to use the in-depth interview method (IDI). It allows for obtaining detailed insights into musicians' experiences, needs, and emotions related to the process of creating and releasing music.
Purpose of the IDI:
- understanding the processes and emotions that the respondent experiences during music creation and release (understanding their workflow),
- identifying the respondent's pain points, motivations, and needs (user pain-points & needs),
- finding recurring user behavior patterns (user behavior patterns),
- identifying whether the respondent does anything to facilitate the music creation and release process. If so, what exactly it is.
Research process
We managed to engage 12 people from the music industry for the research. We conducted interviews remotely in two-person teams (1 - moderator, 1 - note-taker). For the interviews, we used a script I had prepared earlier. During the interviews, I recorded the most important observations along with timestamps. We tried to finish conversations within 45 minutes so as not to lose the respondent's attention. Each conversation was recorded with the respondent's consent.
IDI data analysis
Organizing the most important data from the IDI
The first part of the analysis was listening to each interview from the beginning and writing down answers to specific questions from the script in the form of a board with sticky notes. Each respondent had their own separate board with statements assigned to script questions.
After writing down all observations, we managed to grouped them into three categories (card sorting):
- storage/sharing/information organization
- frustrations,
- tool suggestions
Problem definition
Based on the grouped statements, I found the most frequently recurring ones and defined the problems identified by the respondents based on them.
🤝 Difficulties with motivation, engagement, and teamwork - 10 respondents
- Lack of motivation to delegate tasks and team conflicts.
- Difficulties maintaining the team and lack of engagement from other members.
- Problems with time consumption and collaboration with other people.
📣 Problems with social media management/promotional issues - 7 respondents
- Frustrations related to promotion, running social media, and reaching audiences.
- The necessity of spending time on social media and difficulties with regularly posting content.
- Problems with spamming and promotion on social media.
🎶 Problems with the publishing process - 6 respondents
- Frustrations related to the wide scope of work and maintaining focus during execution.
- Difficulties with publishers and coordinating small details.
- Conflict of interest resulting from multiple roles and impostor syndrome.
🎤 Issues related to booking - 4 respondents
- Difficulties with booking concerts and lack of response from clubs.
- Problems with writing emails and contacting people.
- Performing multiple roles as both artist and businessman is difficult.
User personas
Based on the defined problems and collected data, 4 main personas emerged that helped us better visualize our end users:
- individualist,
- leader,
- team member,
- manager.
Workshops with team
Brainstorm with solutions
The task of our team was to find solutions for the problems reported by the research participants. This way we could consider even the most abstract ideas and extract some added value from them.
Prioritization using the MoSCoW method
Next, we collectively transferred all ideas to a MoSCoW matrix. Thanks to this, we could determine which solutions could be most important for our recipients.
Final result and conclusions
At this stage, we had a clearly defined product vision that responded to the needs of our future users. The research confirmed most of our assumptions about recipients' motivations and frustrations. The research also revealed several surprising areas that we hadn't thought about before. Based on the collected data, we developed a final functionality list that became the foundation for creating the first mockups.
