Background

The Coronavirus pandemic put many people's lives into perspective in March of 2020. Myself and team of interactive designers banded together to recreate the experience that one would have when they go to a concert through an app.
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When we first began our research for this project, we voted on the topic that we would find the most interested in. I found that live music is an entirely different experience when you think about having to attend events virtually. My prior knowledge of research along with user centered design, impacted the different aspects that I contributed to this research and project.
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Some important contributions that I made to this project helped tremendously when continuing my research process in different aspects of my designs.
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Some of those contributions are listed below:

👉 Competitive Audit: To better understand the virtual reality market, I completed a competitive audit that allowed myself and my team to become better SMEs for our application. We looked at different platforms that were launching virtual live concerts and researched their impact on users and the concert going market.

👉 Literature Review: I completed a literature review for my team to better understand how the user will view virtual concerts. There are many articles online that have given insight to the user opinion because of the coronavirus pandemic. Because virtual concerts were the "new normal" in the beginning of 2021, we found many articles that were still skeptical. There was a fine line between the concept of virtual reality and seeing a live concert through an application.

👉 User interviews: One of the most important parts of my research were user interviews. As a team we established our goals and motivations that we wanted to align with our user. This allows us to narrow down our user interview pool. I wanted to know how the virtual concert app would fit into the user's everyday life. I also wanted to understand the frustrations that users experienced with our app. I completed the user interviews in a span of over two weeks. I used Microsoft Teams to record my meeting, as well as Otter.ai to translate what the user was telling me.

Establishing our method

In a typical Sprint, the design team goes through their design process in five days - Monday through Friday, based off one or many processes within an application. The method helps with defining problems in a shorter amount of time, on a smaller scale.

🔍 Monday is where we diagram our problem, interview teammates and other experts, and choose a target for our sprint.
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📝 Tuesday, we look for ideas & inspirations and sketch our our ideas based off of our target projections.
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✏️ Wednesday, we decide on the best solutions and make a plan for our prototype.
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🗓 Thursday is where we decide what tools will be used to build our prototype and start executing our building plan. We create the "rough wireframe" of our prototype and get ready for usability testing on Friday.
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🔑 Friday is where we test our prototype and find patterns from users within our results.

Identifying the question

As someone that's an avid concert goer, not being able to attend a concert during the coronavirus pandemic was truly heartbreaking. I wanted to legitimize these problems and create a solution that can help others that are experiencing the same concert FOMO.
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As a team we thought that it would be best to focus on users that have attended concerts in the past. We wanted to collect user's thoughts and ideas of what the best concert atmosphere would be for them, and what did they gain in the past from going to concerts as well. We concluded that our problem was the spread of Covid-19, but our solution was to bring the feeling of going to a concert to someone's phone.

After listening to the user's problems, we listed the top dissatisfactions that we found frequent:

✋ Users want a physical ticket: A topic that came up many times during user interviews was the fact that users would like a physical ticket as a keepsake. When you attend a game nowadays, you scan a QR code most times. Our users expressed frustration towards that and stated that there would need to be a way to implement a personal keepsake from the virtual concert.

✋ Users want to be able to make friends or go with their friends: Users mentioned going to concerts with their friends as one of the main reasons they would attend concerts in the first place. Users mentioned that they would like a way to be able to meet people that like the same music as them, as they would at an actual concert standing in a crowd.

✋ Users want a high quality concert: Many people mentioned the fact that they already watch live concerts on YouTube, and still don't feel the same feeling they would feel at a concert. Users also noted that there could be bad quality on either ends when there is a live show that is being streamed.

User Research

The next step was to conduct user research. With IRB approval, we were able to interview users that were not our classmates. We set up six user interviews to acquire more information on what prospective users expect from a live concert experience, and we could best translate that to an application. We all attended these user interviews as a team, virtually. We realized that conducting the interviews as a team made our interviewee more comfortable about the product and situation we were asking them about.
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We interview people based on a series of requirements such as attending a concert recently. This qualitative data helped us to gain a better understanding of which aspects of seeing a band live are most important to our users. This research was the first step in helping us identify our problem statement and what we can better do to solve the user's problem when it comes to seeing a live band during the pandemic.

Following our user interviews, we created an Affinity Map in Miro. This helps us lay out all of our information from our interviews and group them according to what has been mentioned by users the most. We also evaluated the overlap as well. Creating an Affinity Map helped us as users to see what common patterns people were looking for when wanting to see a band live virtually. This helped us create the different pages and user flows that were going to be important to our prototype.
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The app vision

We wanted to take our findings from our mapping and research and pinpoint the exact problems that we can solve with our app. We decided to focus on three main areas that we thought would help solve a majority of our user's problems.

🎤 Concert Experience: Our users mentioned multiple times that they want to feel the same feeling they would at a concert, virtually.
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🥁 Streaming Quality: Our users have many different ways to watch a concert. We want to ensure the user is able to have exceptional streaming quality on our end just as much as theirs.

🎸 Involvement: Our users mentioned many times that a big part of attending a concert is being involved in the creative aspect of what the artist is doing.

Finding the user's pain points

After our user interviews and Affinity Mapping, we wanted to highlight our users pain points.
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These pain points are existing problems that users are currently experiencing when attending a virtual concert:
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🎟 No physical ticket
🎽 Cannot buy band/artist merchandise in line before show
🎤 No pre-concert experience
🖥 Virtual concerts sound like music videos
👭 No meeting other fans in line before concert
👬 Inviting friends to concert is not the same
🎤 Low quality streaming of virtual concerts
🎼 Can't request songs to band/artist
🗣 Comment sections move too fast in virtual concerts
🎬 Virtual concert ends abruptly

How might we rankings

We then completed a "How Might We" activity. We basically put ourselves into the shoes of our users and ask ourselves how might we solve this problem for them. We also completed this activity on Miro and our goal was to write done as many ideas as possible and organize them from highest priority to lowest priority. This helped us find the specific user problems that we wanted to solve with this application.

Our How Might We Rankings are as followed, ranked by high priority to low priority.
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👉 HMW have fans interact with each other?
👉 HMW have the artist interact with the fans?
👉 HMW replicate pre-concert activities?
👉HMW get artists to accept suggestions from viewers?
👉HMW provide viewers with a high quality production?
👉HMW provide users with tips/tricks that will improve quality of virtual concert?
👉HMW get viewers excited about upcoming events & share it with others?
👉HMW create time before the show for interaction?
👉HMW provide a smooth end transition to virtual concert?
👉HMW make the ticket token worthy?
👉HMW generate & provide concert goers with a physical ticket?HMW decide what the ticket looks like (what the fans want the ticket to look like)?
👉HMW provide a space/time before concert for users to purchase merchandise?

Once we figured out what our high user needs were as opposed to our lower user needs, we moved onto a 2 x 2 matrix ranking system. This helped us as a group determine what high user needs were the most important things to address for the user. Once we placed our stickies on the 2 x 2 matrix, we completed a dot vote on Miro. Dot voting helps us as a group determine which user needs we were going to tackle first. We decided that the interaction with the fan was the most important part about a concert and a virtual concert to the user.

2x2 Matrix Ranking and HMW Activity

Imagining our Prototype

During our Art Museum, everyone posted their storyboard for critique. We then dot voted on the best storyboard solution after critiquing through each board. Through our dot voting process, the paths we decided on were a video call with the artist and a sing-along feature added to the virtual concert experience. We also agreed to include a replay option so fans will be able to relive the moment with their favorite artist. Our next step was to draft a justification for the paths we chose.
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We first started designing our prototypes by starting with the activity called "Crazy 8's." The focus on creating Crazy 8's is to create as many alternative solutions that we can think of in a short amount of time. This allows us to get our ideas on paper with the user interviews and difficulties fresh on our mind. Once we completed this activity, each team member chose a solution to create a more detailed solution sketch. We worked on this activity on Miro. Following our Crazy 8's activity, we then took our ideas from this and created solution sketches for our prototype. The purpose of our storyboard's were to create a more detailed solution to the users problems. To help us figure out which solution we were going to prototype, we did an activity called "Art Museum Critique."
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Crazy 8's and Solution Sketch

Art Museum Sketches

Creating our Prototype

We chose Figma as our prototype platform and decided that we would design a website interface as opposed to an application interface. As a team, we divided and conquered and created a batch of low fidelity prototypes that we used for our first round of usability testing. Our low fidelity prototypes helped us determine what we could best fix according to usability testing.

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Low Fidelity Prototype

User Testing

Once we refined our low fidelity prototype and completed our high fidelity prototype, we were ready to test our users. We created a usability test plan to prepare for the interviews. We wanted our user to complete a set of tasks that were based off of our findings. We also informed our users to walk through our prototype and express what they're thinking and their opinion about the user flow. We referred to this as a Think Out Loud protocol. For each interview, we all took extensive notes so we would be able to talk about our key takeaways.

User Testing Script

Our most valuable findings

After establishing our problem statement, my team and I collaborated together to create a storyboard of what we thought the user flow should be for the user to have a better experience.

We came up with these features that we thought would make a better user experience:

🕺🏻 Meet up virtually with other concert goers: We wanted the users to be able to essentially have a "breakout room" with other people that are attending the same concert virtually as well. This lets the users meet other people that have the same music interest as them.

💻 Create a chat option: Allow the users to request songs from the artist, as well as talk to others in a chat during the concert. We also wanted to give the artist a chance to chat directly with the users as well and even give them the option to join a breakout room if they wanted.

🛍 Virtual merchandise: Create a virtual store for users to be able to search and even buy limited edition concert merchandise that make the concert going experience more unique to the user.

The most noted problem among all of our usability tests, based on information we gathered from interviews, was that the order of the buttons on the screen could be changed to, because that is the common order for more playlist like UI's. The example is shown here:
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(L to R)
1. Volume
2. Mute
3. Screenshot
4. Settings
5. End Call

Qualitative Results

Final Thoughts

The 2020 Coronavirus pandemic put many past time activities into perspective when the thought of people in groups was almost in a way detrimental. Throughout our interviews, we found that many people do love the feeling of being at a venue and experiencing a concert in person. We wanted to mirror that feeling the best that we could with our prototype.
Overall, our research was impactful to how we designed our pages. We wanted to pinpoint each problem that the user had, and solve it best we could. Overall, our users had a great experience with our website prototype. We were able to learn a lot from both their reactions and feedback and refine our prototypes based off of this research. We successfully addressed a key pain point in recreating a live concert virtually.

Tiketi.

OVERVIEW

ROLE

What Zoom fatigue? Pandemic virtual concerts may have changed live music forever - New York Times