“Bandcamp is an online record store and music community where passionate fans discover, connect, and directly support the artists they love.”
Because of Covid-19 musicians and creative artists have been hugely impacted. Two points have been suggested:
• To create a platform where aspiring artists can connect with established artists to further their work.
• To leverage the goodwill between the users and the brand to give back to the artists on the platform.
Louis & I began our research with a competitive and comparative analysis of the landscape, and looked at a broad range of products including social media and emerging media platforms.
At the same time we interviewed 6 current or former musicians to find their needs and pain points.
The five categories of mentorship that users sought were:
We plotted these categories in a User Flow to give us an idea of the structure of the solution.
Meet the Jetsons. They're a distillation of what was in our minds when we combined the users we interviewed. They present the best user-case to benefit from the solution we'd like to offer.
The Jetsons have reached a ceiling and are struggling to find new fans.
They want to find ways to further their brand so they can tour internationally.
To begin our ideation, Louis and I got some quick ideas down in Crazy Eights to explore fleeting thoughts on how we could integrate the categories from our interviews into the existing native iOS app.
We'd arrived at a crossroads as Bandcamp exists as both a desktop/mobile site viewed in a browser, and as a native app on iOS. There are differing design languages between the two. Which one would we go with?
We resolved to build both, and test both!
I took the native app, and Louis took the mobile site.
Using the existing Bandcamp native app framework, I implemented a mentorship flow within it:
Though no great issues were found, Louis' proposition tested better with 3 of 4 users preferring it.
In addition, to help us decide we revisited our persona in The Jetsons and realised they wouldn't want to be confined to their small screens if accessing content and calls with mentors as a group of four!
We resolved to combine the existing elements of the native app with the new menu system of the mobile-first proposition.
We tested with 5 users to get an idea of the main issues we could look at.
Remember The Jetsons? We wanted to give them a User Story to their interaction with the Hi-Fidelity Prototype to frame it in a way that would see the most use.
It also serves to reinforce the Social Good angle: when it helps The Jetsons further their potential as a band, it helps Bandcamp too.
As a band, The Jetsons are desperate to find some advice about Branding so that they can do an International Tour!
During this project what became clear to me was the importance of consistency in design across all platforms, so that when one feature is added a product can scale to accommodate it.
I also realised it was risky to separate our partnership in the ‘develop’ phase. It was a risky bet to cover more ground. If, in the case of one of us coming to a dead end, our result could be lost time and lost work.
Though the greatest gift of this project remained our interviewees: artists past and present. Their unanimous gesture forward for Mentorship was the best motivation we could have asked for.
Listen to your fans, and listen to your users!
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