VIII Music UX Research

Best known for it’s viral Facebook events – JUNO Fest Hamilton at the Molson Studio, Gage Park electronic music festival, Artcrawl Tivoli Theatre POPKULT electronic music stage. The Number VIII was in need of a UX designer when realizing the need to transition to digital and make use of an online presence beginning to reach cities in outside provinces, such as New Brunswick. As a result, this UX analysis needed to start from scratch. Moreover, a strategy was needed to structure this new product design to be sustainable for growth.

My Approach

After a thorough conversation with the founder and primary stakeholder, I began to narrow down various avenues of where we can find our key persona. A critical decision when getting to know business objectives was to focus on the music creator versus the music listener/concert-goer, as they had both kinds of users in their social database. Taking this direction, the brainstorming sessions were very insightful, in regard to the motivations of a working musician. While interviewing, we spoke to musicians from local open-mic singers to Berklee College alumni. We concluded various pain points for musicians today and grouped various personas into several qualitative categories. After, we then began to prototype and test various product options tailored for the end-user; iterations contrasted to even serve the extreme user. In this case, bringing back the needs of a music fan or potentially a music industry scout.

In this HCD analysis, our goal is to understand the deeper motivations as to why. A common theme was the desire to be heard. Therefore, the affordance of a radio broadcast is the proposed solution to bridge the gap between the independant musician and the 21st-century publisher.

The Result

The product we built is a music industry radio, featuring music from Drake to Justin Bieber, and various other up and coming artists. Through the interactive billboard chart and programing, listeners are encouraged to use this platform to nominate their favourite independent artists. Using this b2c platform helps The Number VIII discover many b2b prospects as a publishing entity looking to expand its songwriter database.