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
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
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
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"
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.
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.