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Hi. I'm Sam.
Let's get your user feeling grateful for getting to experience your thing!
A thing should be so well designed it requires neither explanation nor demonstration. Bam!
"No–Words Design"
Below is the showcase of my one and only UX project I have under my belt so far, "MusicMatch." I recently earned a UX-design certificate from CareerFoundry out of Berlin, and this portfolio-piece is the final project from that course and is merely conceptual.
Hi. I'm Sam.
Let's get your user feeling grateful for getting to experience your thing!
A thing should be so well designed it requires neither explanation nor demonstration. Bam! "No–Words Design"
Goals
- to provide music students remote access to quality music teachers
- to provide music students with an affordable means of receiving quality music education
- to provide music students with an accountability partner
- to provide music TEACHERS with an easy and convenient way to make some side-cash
- to provide both music students and music teachers a milieu for networking and self-promotion
- to empower the company to generate as much profit as possible!!
Project Overview
As merely a conceptual piece, MusicMatch is a webapp I designed as the culminating project for a six-month UX course I recently completed (CareerFoundry.com). The neutral prompt I followed was: “Create a web-app that connects people with experts.” Given my expertise in music education, I conjured a platform for music students to remotely receive coaching from music teachers.
DISCOVERY
For the sake of whipping up a solid Problem Statement, I first brainstormed a long list of the “needs” + “possible solutions” for both music students and music teachers. I do normally abide by the golden rule of “Don’t design it for yourself,” though this was a student project, so I made life easy by just making me MusicMatch’s prime persona. (I am both a former music student and a current music teacher. Gave my first drum lesson when I was 14. 🎵)
The most significant thingies from that brainstormed list were:
Music students need:
- productive feedback from people who actually know what they’re talking about, not merely their surrounding friends and family. "You sound so wonderful, Darling!" says non-musician mom.
Possible Solution: Provide students with ability to submit video/audio of themselves playing their musical instrument + written exams and receive actually useful feedback from vetted, pro, working musician.
- an easy way to share their work. Possible Solution: provide user-friendly portfolio platform / galleries for displaying videos and audio files.
- a way to get promoted by mentors. Possible Solution: provide ability for students to be rated/endorsed/elevated publicly by mentor(s). “Spotlighted Musician of the Month”
Music teacher need:
- a way to promote and grow their teaching service. Provide a milieu that optimally facilitates the student-teacher interaction.
Problem Statement
For the sake of elevating their musicianship, music students need a way to receive both honest feedback on the quality of their current playing + useful instruction/guidance from vetted, professional musicians/educators. The measures of success will be both the metrics of students' self-reported satisfaction and the frequency of students successfully performing/demonstrating musical understanding via an internally facilitated hierarchy of examinations juried by small groups of mentors, which will involve mentors viewing objectively definitive, before & after videos of students' musical progress.
Checking Out the Competition
Next on the agenda was checking out any potential competition! In retrospect, the two companies I found were not the right style of companies to be studying (Audiu and Landr). MusicMatch’s model is essential all about students finding a music teacher, and both Audiu’s and Landr’s models are all about amateur “music producers” getting feedback on their produced music. Since the prompt for this whole project was, “Enable a user to receive feedback from an expert,” my researcher-brain got stuck on “get feedback.” Yes, on Audiu and Landr’s music-makers can “get feedback” like how on MusicMatch music-makers can “get feedback,” but the style of business-model I should have been learning from was that of the live, online, music-lesson platforms.
Though still, from both Audiu and Landr I did glean a few thingies:(All listed thingies eventually hit the cutting-room floor, but if MusicMatch ever becomes a real-world project, these are a few elements I gleaned that I would definitely add to the list of considerations.)- Maybe offer user a spectrum of price-points: low and high-priced mentors.- Maybe offer user an internal, MusicMatch social-media for both students and mentors to be able to connect with their peers.- Maybe offer user a “Knowledge Library,” maybe in the form of a YouTube channel packed with music lessons.- Maybe offer user extended assistance in self-promotion, “Career Coaching.”
Next on the agenda was checking out any potential competition! In retrospect, the two companies I found were not the right style of companies to be studying (Audiu and Landr).
MusicMatch’s model is essential all about students finding a music teacher, and both Audiu’s and Landr’s models are all about amateur “music producers” getting feedback on their produced music. Since the prompt for this whole project was, “Enable a user to receive feedback from an expert,” my researcher-brain got stuck on “get feedback.” Yes, on Audiu and Landr’s music-makers can “get feedback” like how on MusicMatch music-makers can “get feedback,” but the style of business-model I should have been learning from was that of the live, online, music-lesson platforms.Though still, from both Audiu and Landr I did glean a few thingies:(All listed thingies eventually hit the cutting-room floor, but if MusicMatch ever becomes a real-world project, these are a few elements I gleaned that I would definitely add to the list of considerations.)- Maybe offer user a spectrum of price-points: low and high-priced mentors.- Maybe offer user an internal, MusicMatch social-media for both students and mentors to be able to connect with their peers.- Maybe offer user a “Knowledge Library,” maybe in the form of a YouTube channel packed with music lessons.- Maybe offer user extended assistance in self-promotion, “Career Coaching.”
User Stories
CONCEPTION
Research Methods
My choices of which research methods to use:
Concept Testing was the clear and obvious first step. “Hey, whadaya think about a service where music students could pay professional music teachers to receive honest and productive feedback on their work? Might you or someone you know use such a service?” Maybe they’ll say, “Heck yeah! Where do I sign up?” or maybe they’ll say, “Pfff...yeah right! Sounds dumb.” Based on the tallies of yays and nays I got a better understanding of the general enthusiasm for such an app as MusicMatch.
Interviews: Having conducted one-on-one interviews with mostly musicians [both amateur and pro] I gathered insight into the needs of particular styles of personas. After the Concept Testing, I had plenty of fodder for crafting ultra-specific interview questions.
Other Hypothetical Methods: If this had been a real-world project with a healthy budget, the other research methods I would have used would have used would have been a Focus Group, Ethnographic Field Studies, and Participatory Design.
Interviews Nutshell
From the seven mostly-musicians participants I interviewed, my prime takeaways were:
Brian (pro musician & music teacher) anticipates, “MusicMatch would be a flop because of what it IS inherently. The stereotypical starving-artist-market is an inherent risk. Services like GigFinder merely cater to the desperate, talentless losers with no money.”
Yeah, an inherent risk indeed! If I was designing MusicMatch for someone else, I would heavily suggest me doing a severe amount of research to reveal the app’s actual potential value/demand.
Trevor (pro musician and music teacher) said, “Every moment during a person’s learning-journey needs to be gratifying, even receiving tough love or even brutal love–with a confident delivery–can be received graciously and productively. I don’t want the can-do-no-wrong praise from Mom. I want honest and PRODUCTIVE feedback from someone who actually knows realistically what good musicianship looks like.”
From this tidbit I thought, “People who are built into a music student’s daily life (like Mom) aren’t the ones to be giving feedback because, DESPITE the parent even potentially being a pro musician, the intimate closeness to the student inherently trumps the validity of whatever feedback (both positive and negative) from Mom. SO, logically, serious students only want to hear how they’re actually doing from individuals who have no skin in the game, like Mom; her skin in the game is potentially marring her intimately close relationship with her own child by saying, “Well actually, Honey. Ughhhh.... The sound coming from that violin makes me want to spoon out my eyes.”
MusicMatch would offer an inherently non-intimate milieu for receiving feedback not only from individuals who don’t bear a personal risk in giving it to the student straight, but these individuals also just so happen to be pro musicians and vetted, quality music teachers.
Mom (amateur musician & parent of pro musician) “Parents might become the biggest part of my bread and butter, particularly delusional tiger-moms who want to get their kid to be the best damn bassoonist on the planet!”
I asked Trevor, “What are your thoughts about parents “forcing” kid to practice? He replied, “I think it’s HORRIBLE!!!” The learning of an art ABSOLUTELY needs to be self-fueled; NOT parents “making their kid practice!”
Combining both Mom’s and Trevor’s sentiments, I thought, “Yeah, MusicMatch can be a kid’s opportunity to take in their OWN hands more of the reins of their OWN education away from Mom, literally as an app on their phone in their hands. An education is no education if it’s forced or not fully “owned.”
This thought was not incorporated into the design, but rather this would be fodder for the marketing campaign. Maybe somewhere in the app’s intro-slides/onboarding something like, “Take the wheel of your OWN mastery of music!!” (Some may not know what the heck “reins” even are!)
Analyzing the Research
As the first inkling of what the basic elements of the app would be, I crafted a dozen user stories. Here’s one that made it into the final design:
"As a user who wants to communicate in my most preferred method, I want to be matched only with others who share the same preference, so we can all express ourselves in the most fitting, convenient, and comfortable way possible."
Here within MusicMatch's "Profile Creation" flow is the spot where both the student and mentor will designate the form(s) of communication they are willing to engage in. These communication preferences are one of the prime factors for "matching."
Music “Match”
Here is a sketch of how the app would “match” students with teachers. Within the onboarding process the student will take a musicianship assessment and also identify their demographic. If that data lines up with the criteria designated by the mentor, a “match” will trigger.
- If I cater and market to the “starving artist” types, Artist Match risks being a bust. It will be important to gear Artist Match also toward young students, parents of students, college students and grads, conservatory students and grads.
- In fact, the demographic to build Artist Match for might be the mentors. Maybe if the platform is everything it should be for the Mentors, then maybe the platform will organically grow via the Mentors spreading the word.
- I should consider marketing Artist Match as a viable alternative to the ludicrously over-priced modern college, universities, and conservatories. Musicianship is purely a meritocracy. Zero music leaders care about where a player may have gone to school or who they studied under; all they care about is, “Can you play?”
Insights
- There will need to be equal attention put onto the Student User elements and the Mentor User elements.
- Many of the discovered elements are equally relevant to both Student and Mentors Users.
- Doing user-research interviews with the music-pros is way more helpful than doing interviews with the non-music-pros (obviously).
- Creating a Knowledge Library for both the Student and Mentor Users might be beneficial.
The needs of my primary “Musician/Student” persona are what drove the quality of both the UX and the UI (choosing a dark/noir aesthetic to be stylistically consistent with the nocturnal nature of the milieux musicians find themselves absorbed into; “creatures of the night.”), whereas the needs of my secondary type-A, “Tiger Mom” persona are what drove the quality of the UX to be that much smoother. My Tiger Mom’s expectations are extra snappy concerning smooth usability.
Personas
PROTOTYPING & TESTING
Site Map Evolution
User Journeys Maps
This particular User Journey Map for Federico here was my way of super-duper stepping into his mind along his "Initiate Service" flow. Attempting to see things things from his mental-model, I zoomed in on every little "phase" along this single flow for the sake of anticipating/hypothesizing his thoughts/questions/pain-points along the way.
What I'm showing you with this one is an ultra-granular zoom-in on his anticipated thoughts and feelings during each of the four primary phases during his time navigating within the "Initiate Service" flow.
Upon getting more into my participants mental-model from my participants’ results, I thought to add “My Profile/Editing Content” and “Social Media” to my sitemap’s primary sub-layer. Most created categories offered me zero insight. A study with more than merely 20 terms might have yielded more interesting category names.I made the mistake of not identifying the part-of-speech for my term “Objective.” I should have put into parenthesis, “(as an adjective, for example: objective feedback).” All participants thought of “objective” as a noun, which resulted in that question becoming worthless : /I wish OptimalWorkshop’s card-sorting feature allowed for participants to add notes directly to their created groups so they could share why they made those choices. I also wish it allowed participants to add their names their surveys so I could know who did what and I could ask questions. I also wish OptimalWorkshop’s card-sorting feature allowed me to see what participants saw on their screen upon finishing, or even a screen recording of their process (maybe accompanied by audio or webcam recording of participants thinking out loud during process).
User Flow
("Requesting a Service")
Upon getting more into my participants mental-model from my participants’ results, I thought to add “My Profile/Editing Content” and “Social Media” to my sitemap’s primary sub-layer. Most created categories offered me zero insight. A study with more than merely 20 terms might have yielded more interesting category names.I made the mistake of not identifying the part-of-speech for my term “Objective.” I should have put into parenthesis, “(as an adjective, for example: objective feedback).” All participants thought of “objective” as a noun, which resulted in that question becoming worthless : /I wish OptimalWorkshop’s card-sorting feature allowed for participants to add notes directly to their created groups so they could share why they made those choices. I also wish it allowed participants to add their names their surveys so I could know who did what and I could ask questions. I also wish OptimalWorkshop’s card-sorting feature allowed me to see what participants saw on their screen upon finishing, or even a screen recording of their process (maybe accompanied by audio or webcam recording of participants thinking out loud during process).
Upon getting more into my participants mental-model from my participants’ results, I thought to add “My Profile/Editing Content” and “Social Media” to my sitemap’s primary sub-layer. Most created categories offered me zero insight. A study with more than merely 20 terms might have yielded more interesting category names.I made the mistake of not identifying the part-of-speech for my term “Objective.” I should have put into parenthesis, “(as an adjective, for example: objective feedback).” All participants thought of “objective” as a noun, which resulted in that question becoming worthless : /I wish OptimalWorkshop’s card-sorting feature allowed for participants to add notes directly to their created groups so they could share why they made those choices. I also wish it allowed participants to add their names their surveys so I could know who did what and I could ask questions. I also wish OptimalWorkshop’s card-sorting feature allowed me to see what participants saw on their screen upon finishing, or even a screen recording of their process (maybe accompanied by audio or webcam recording of participants thinking out loud during process).
I crafting the scaffolding the app’s primary functions to organize the macro of what I wanted to create and lay out a plan of attack.
Contrasting the first draft to the final draft, both the “Marketplace” and “Knowledge Library” hit the cutting room floor. For the sake of focusing on first producing a minimally viable product, I lopped off all elements that were not directly relevant to the app’s primary function of “matching students with mentors.”
Low•Mid•High Fidelity
After conducting a usability test on six musicians–who are also parents–and gathering specific feedback, I prioritized the needed changes using these charts.
Design Language System
Polishing the Design
the webapp that matches
individual music students with individual music mentors!
CASE STUDY
Usability Testing Feedback
Final MockUps
This document communicates all the little specs for my developer.
Here are a few samples of little iterations I made toward the end of the process to make things that much more humancentric/accessible.
Create Your
Personal Profile
Find a Mentor
The needs of my primary “Musician/Student” persona are what drove the quality of both the UX and the UI (choosing a dark/noir aesthetic to be stylistically consistent with the nocturnal nature of the milieux musicians find themselves absorbed into; “creatures of the night.”), whereas the needs of my secondary type-A, “Tiger Mom” persona are what drove the quality of the UX to be that much smoother. My Tiger Mom’s expectations are extra snappy concerning smooth usability
Check Out
Mentor's Response
Request Service
Create Your
Personal Profile
Request Service
Find a Mentor
Check Out
Mentor's Response
As merely a conceptual piece, MusicMatch is a webapp I designed as the culminating project for a six-month UX course I recently completed (CareerFoundry.com). The neutral prompt I followed was: “Create a web-app that connects people with experts.” Given my expertise in music education, I conjured a platform for music students to remotely receive coaching from music teachers.
Project Overview
Problem Statement
For the sake of elevating their musicianship, music students need a way to receive both honest feedback on the quality of their current playing + useful instruction/guidance from vetted, professional musicians/educators. The measures of success will be both the metrics of students' self-reported satisfaction and the frequency of students successfully performing/demonstrating musical understanding via an internally facilitated hierarchy of examinations juried by small groups of mentors, which will involve mentors viewing objectively definitive, before & after videos of students' musical progress.
Below is the showcase of my one and only UX project I have under my belt so far, "MusicMatch." I recently earned a UX-design certificate from CareerFoundry out of Berlin, and this portfolio-piece is the final project from that course and is merely conceptual.
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