DICE is an app for finding and buying tickets to live music. DICE leadership wants to implement a subscription service that enables users to discover and attend new live shows featuring small bands and independent venues.
This was a collaborative project with 3 other UX/UI designers. I took the lead on user research, facilitated the design studio and moderated team discussions before producing a high-fidelity final product.
Our solution provided users with:
We began by devising a broad research plan that sought to understand where we could provide value in the subscription service. Our plan was to utilise:
We first carried out some competitive analysis to better understand the existing market, and found that the majority of subscription services for live music events were primarily targeting larger gigs with well known artists. Their key features typically included VIP experiences, access to premium seats and earlybird access to tickets, none of which felt relevant to small gigs with unknown artists.
We concluded that there may be a gap in the market for a subscription service promoting independent artists and small venues, but we still didn’t know what features would be of most value to our target users.
We carried out a screener survey to identify people who regularly attended live music shows and had experience of using the DICE app.
We identified and interviewed 22 people, seeking to understand:
Following this second round of user interviews we identified the following key insights:
All of our findings allowed us to refine our initial assumptions and create both a persona and user journey to help visualise our user’s challenges and enable us to better empathise with their problems.
Emily is a 27 year old young professional from London that loves live music and frequently sees shows in small venues.
We then created a user journey to map out Emily’s problems and identify opportunities where features in the subscription service could solve them.
We then created a series of problem statements in order to help concentrate our research insights and prioritise design decisions by identifying the most important user needs and pain points.
I facilitated a design studio where I centered our idea generation around the 3 How Might We questions created earlier.
Over 3 rounds of design studio we managed to combine several ideas into one coherent vision for the subscription service. The service would consist of:
With our mid-fidelity prototype built we were able to begin user testing to make sure the subscription would be easy to use. We elected to try using unmoderated user tests on Maze.com, hoping that this would provide us with a larger feedback sample than we could achieve in the same time frame carrying out moderated tests.
We received 21 responses to our test, which consisted of 5 specific tasks and an open-ended question asking for more general feedback. Participants largely reacted positively to the design, particularly citing the use of the schedule tracker and time-box chat thread as exciting features.
Before going into building the high fidelity prototype we decided to maintain the visual language of the brand to provide users with a sense of familiarity, as this is an expansion of the current app.
DICE were looking to implement a subscription service that enabled users to discover and attend new live shows featuring small bands and independent venues.
Our solution provided users with a curated list of upcoming events in their area, all of which featured small bands and independent venues. The use of Gems as a token/currency provides subscribers with better value tickets; and the time boxed chat threads connects them to both the other audience members and artists.
Implements Hidden Gem subscription as a type of gig within the carousel at the top of the page.
Showcases the upcoming gigs that are included in the subscription service and a sneak peek of events further in to the future.
Event page shows key information for users to review and decide on a gig.
Allows users to buy tickets using Gems, the token currency. Also highlights potential additional perks of the subscription.
Ticket screen has a progress bar to keep users informed about logistics and progress of the gig.
Ticket screen has the ticket in app as a QR code, and provides access to the gig chat.
Allows confirmed attendees to talk to each other, promoting connectivity.
Enables users to engage with the artist, for example to make song requests.
The chat thread is time boxed to become inactive 48hours after the gig.
Overview of the finished project.
If we were to continue on with this project, our immediate next step would be to design and implement an onboarding process for the Hidden Gems service. This could in reality consist of its own UX cycle, but other ideas we would have liked to pursue include: