Digital Tip Jar
Summary
I collaborated in a group project called Digital Tip Jar, which tackled the problem of incorporating local musicians into New Orleans’ tourist economy. Our project also focused on empowering users with access to modern digital tools. We worked under the banner of UX4Good; an organization of designers and developers whose goal is to solve real world problems through design challenges. The development process took us from discovery, through to a prototype implementation, and evaluation with users.
While I worked across every portion of the project with my teammates, my focus was on the following deliverables: competitive analysis, sketching and wireframing designs, prototyping, and user testing.
Problem Space
New Orleans is a major tourist destination, with the area in receipt of hundreds of millions of dollars of tourism revenue, annually. However, street musicians are not as tightly incorporated into that flow of prosperity, and also struggle with self-promotion.
The goal was to create a two way street of engagement between artists and tourists , for the artists to share his/her art, and for tourists to find and support the artists they enjoy, while removing the need for physical currency to change hands, by incorporating digital payments.
Role/Tools
The project teams were further divided into a fan engagement team and a musician management team. The worked on the fan engagement team. and contributed across the entire process. I had direct impacts on the competive analysis, sketches, wireframes and prototyping in Axure. I was the primary tester to perform the usability evaluation .
Discovery
We were introduced to our stakeholders who are musicians, and/or familiar with New Orleans culture.
Stakeholder themes
Our first research efforts were to engage the stakeholders to get a lay of the land. We developed a hypothesis from those conversations, and began the validation process by talking with potential users.
The fan engagement team was tasked with seeking people who are music aficionados , who like to travel for music events. We interviewed 4 people from the midwest, and 4 people from the west coast.
Music fans themes
I was assigned to explore the competitive landscape, and search for existing services. I created an affinity diagram to illustrate my findings, and presented them to the team.
Affinity diagram, detailing some strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities
This is myself presenting the competitive analysis to the group, walking through the document I collaborated on with colleagues
Storyboard, for music fan - Felicity the Fan
We combined the feedback received from our stakeholder and user interviews, as well as incorporating features that we felt would garner interest, including gamification elements, that would serve as a product differentiator and user engagement mechanism.
Design
From the discovery work that was done, we wanted to move in the direction of an application that would allow fans to engage their artist directly, follow their updates, and provide a fun incentive for participation through gamification. We designed for mobile and desktop, but focused on a responsive desktop site.
We developed the task flow and site map for the responsive site, before moving on to sketching, and then wireframing.
The core tasks that we focused on, included allowing for users to search for musicians, tip their favorite musicians, and share the media that is captured during a performance.
Fan Task Flow - Search for , and recommend Musicians, and Upload Media
These wireframes embody our learnings from the research, which indicate some anxiety about tipping :
“what's in my wallet?”
“i can’t tip everyone”
”is there a tip jar near the stage?”
Also, some fans didn’t know the identity of the street performers (lack of signage, and self promotion materials).
We wanted to address these needs within the design, in the form of prominent call to actions for tipping, and enable users to find the musicians they are searching for.
The prototype was set to evaluate if users could complete the following tasks -
- Find a musician
- Tip your favorite musician
- Upload/share media
Users were able to complete all three of the tasks, and overall find it easy to use.
Users also liked the aspect of being a part of a street team, which encouraged sharing content with others. Some problems uncovered, included too many clicks needed for searching for bands. Users were also confused about the limited functionality of the prototype , and was not clear on what worked, and did not work.
In a future iteration , the action items would be to simplify the interaction for musician discovery, and also update the user testing script to set the expectation of the test users , such that they are clear on the limited functionality of the prototype.
Conclusion and Lessons Learned
Ultimately, it was a fantastic experience. I've encountered some interesting challenges, and have a better understanding of the importance of iteration, collaboration, and communication from hands-on experiences.
I gained a newfound respect for the struggles of artists, and the various issues that they face in the pursuit of their passions. This includes being under-banked and not having all the resources for engaging in a digital economy.
The user testing revealed to us that we are generally on the correct track, with users being able to complete the three user tasks satisfactorily. However, improvements to the interface were suggested to simplify the steps required for the musician discovery tasks. Additionally, there is trust concerns with electronic payments, and associating a financial account with the site.
The assets and design elements were turned over to UX4Good, to use as a guide to further develop this idea.