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Superfan Dashboard for Riff Music Entreprenuer

The ultimate dashboard for tracking fan metrics and creating tasks to improve or maintain those metrics

Duration

4 weeks

Role

UX Designer for task management features

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Final Prototype

A Virtual Artist Manager 

OVERVIEW

Riff Music Entrepreneur is an online music artist management platform. Right now, Riff operates five dashboards within their platform to help their artists plan projects, collect funding, and offer curricula to teach artists about the industry. Riff currently operates using the beta version of its platform which has around 360 artists and managers using their product. 

What's a Successful Musician without Fans?

PROBLEM STATEMENT

For this project, Riff wants to create a Superfan Builder dashboard that shows users their fan metrics and offers the ability to create tasks to improve or maintain those metrics. This dashboard is the heart of the entire artist management platform since it revolves around building the artists successful music career.

 

Our desired outcome was to show artists their fan metrics without overwhelming them with a multitude of graphs and charts. 

Users & Audience

Rockstar

Christian Tropiano

28 years old | Male

Bio
Christian spends his disposable income & time for his music career

Personal quote
"What am I doing wrong? I'm constantly improving my content & voice but I'm not seeing any growth in my audience or revenue, What's preventing me being a full-time artist? Am I wasting my time/ recourses?"

Artists Challenges

Christian’s high-engagement interactions aren’t driving enough revenue (ticket sales, merch sales, etc.)

Christian has a tough time getting more people to listen & keeping his fans consistently engaged

Christian can’t identify which tools & tactics will drive him closer to financial safety & audience growth

Artists Need the Ability to Take Action on their Data.

Roles & Responsibilities

Our team consisted of four UX Designers. Though we all worked together on bringing Riff's dashboard to life, we each took ownership and designed specific features of the dashboard.

It wasn't until about a week into the project that I realized we were building a task manager platform and not just a dashboard with artists fan metrics, charts and graphs. 

 

Thus, my role was to iterate and design the task/project timeline feature, the task manager, and the add a task pop-up. 

A Race against Time

Scope & Constraints

Two of our biggest constraints were timezone and timeline. All four of us designers live within a different time zone and had competing work schedules. More importantly, we worked within a tight timeline of one week to conduct usability testing, present design recommendations, and prepare for the hand-off. The majority of our time was spent clarifying deliverables and what our stakeholders had envisioned for the project and iterating on our wireframes. 

Our Process

Approach

Define

Understanding problem space
Defining project goals
Forming a schedule

Design

Wireframes
Feedback Session 1
High Fidelity
Feedback Session 2
Prototype

 

Evaluate

User-based testing (5)
Design changes & recommendations

Current Beta Platform

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Applying Key Findings from Past Usability Tests of Riff's Dashboards to Inform Design Decisions

Key findings from past case studies of Riff's dashboards found that users were overwhelmed by many charts and graphs. This led artists to feel information overload of what to do next or what was most important.

The team designed wireframes of the Superfan dashboard that sought to meet the deliverables of showing fan metrics while not overwhelming the user.

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Due to our limited time frame and resources, our team was not able to test the wireframes created with Riff’s targeted users. Instead, we conducted several Zoom calls with the project manager and CEO to clarify we covered their user stories, pain points and jobs-to-be-done. Several changes were made.

"I Don't Know What is Most Important or Where to Click First"

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First Major Improvement

Our goal was for artists to know what their immediate areas of concern were. That is why we emphasized information hierarchy within the Superfan dashboard.

 

We designed more space for the welcome widget where artists  take action on immediate areas of concern and placed the task manager higher within the dashboard since artists work refer to it frequently.

Information Overload = Decision Fatigue

Second Major Improvement

 

Based on user feedback, information overload from overuse of graphs prevented users from making decisions within the dashboard.

 

Because of this, we hid the in-depth insights and information from users and allow them to click on each metric to view it's in-depth data allowing them to see only what they want to.

Updated Dashboard.png

Artists Want to be Musicians... Not Marketing Mavens

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Third Major Improvement

A pain point we saw in user interviews was that most artists did not know what actions to take to improve their fan metrics. 

To overcome this challenge, our team designed a 'Recommended Tasks' feature that would show the artist the tasks Riff recommends completing to improve a certain metric.

Artists loved this feature because it removed the barrier of not knowing what actions to take and did the hard work for them!

Usability Testing

The main goal for our design team was to validate that artists would not become overwhelmed when using our dashboard, to ensure it was intuitive, and to test if the UX writing made sense.

To do this, we had the project manager recruit (5) artists and manager participants who are currently working within the beta platform. We conducted the tests via Zoom/remotely using Usability Testing of the Superfan dashboard prototype.

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To gather thoughts, feelings, and impressions of the dashboard, we asked the users a sieres of qualitative questions. To identity any usability issues and gauge intuitiveness, we walked the users through quantitative tasks.

Key Findings & Design Changes

01

When asked to create a task to improve a metric on the welcome widget, 80% of users did not know where to click.

02

60% found the dashboard to be text-heavy.

 

The task manager originally displayed text-heavy content with the details of one task.

03

80% of participants did not know how or where to sync their music and social platforms to their dashboard.

80% of participants knew how to use the product and all participants enjoyed using it and would use it again.

Future Research & Changes

Artists expressed confusion over the metric terms (ei. Conversion, Superfan) I'd recommend an information icon per metric so the user has a better understanding.

2/5 participants asked to see more data on location of their listeners and streams to create successful ad campaigns. I'd recommend showing fan base location and streams on main dashboard.

UI of task manager and metric project timeline tasks is not cohesive. I'd design the task manager and project timeline to look similar to improve relation between the two.

Continue to do research on the iterations we made. We only had time for one usability test of our prototype.

Thank You!

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