User Research
FIELD RESEARCH
TARGET USER
The target users of the app would be concertgoers and live music enthusiasts living in Los Angeles. While this application could also appeal to tourists, its functionality is catered more toward those who want an intimate experience with the city and to find hole-in-the-walls events. Most likely they will be young adults in their 20’s-30’s with expendable income, looking for fun, and familiar with mobile technology. They would use the app while walking around Los Angeles, perhaps on an evening out with friends looking for things to do. Users would be able to pull out their phones and open the application to hear the music that have been historically played in venues (constrained to a certain radius) with events happening that night. This would lead to them discovering music events nearby.
CONTEXT & RESEARCH METHOD
To conduct my user research, I plan on conducting an in-person and video interview with direct observation. Due to constraints in these current times, I will not be able to conduct research in the desired context of usage. Additionally, there are usage and search result limitations within the app I wish to study. Fortunately, however, I am able to use hypothetical questions to ask how the user discovers local music events without having to be on location or with full app functionality, either with people in my household or over video call.
The interview will be twofold: first, I will ask questions regarding the subject’s perception of discovering music events in Los Angeles and current methods, and secondly, I will ask the subject to complete several tasks (finding a local concert, discovering a new venue, and discovering a new artist) to test the usability of the local music event discovery app Hereby. The interview will last approximately 60 minutes, and I will collect the user data with voice and screen recordings, along with written notes.
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Below you can find links to the study materials:
DATA
Below are links to each participant's individual interview transcripts, audio recordings, and screen recordings for the tasks in the study. For ease of reading, original pen and paper notes have been digitized in the link below.
Participant 1
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Participant 2
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Participant 3
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Participant 4
Participant 5
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Participant 6
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Participant 7
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RESULTS
USER MOTIVATIONS
The field research revealed that when it comes to discovering new music and local novel live music experiences, target users are willing and open to trying new things, but they are not necessarily self-motivated to do so. There is an undeniable social aspect of attending live music events; most people found out about new music and events through word-of-mouth, and would only go to concerts if their friends were also going. Most used Facebook Events as a way to passively discover new events and Ticketmaster for searching information about specific events, mostly due to its reputation and trustworthiness. Usually, people only attend concerts for artists that they already know, and most have not considered smaller venues with lesser-known artists, though they show an interest in these, especially if they are at a cheaper cost. Smaller event attendance seemed to resonate more with participants in the study that were out of college, and though most of the people in the study were in college, I believe that this activity would be more common in an older crowd with more time and a disposable income. Overall, however, live music event attendance is seen as a special occasion in one's life, and not something that people do very often due to lack of convenience.
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The average rating of importance for how close Los Angeles is to live music events was a 4.4/10.
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Cost, distance, and interest (in the artist) are the top 3 factors that affect live music event attendance.
HEARBY EVALUATION
PARTICIPANT REACTIONS
TOP WORDS SELECTED IN PRODUCT SATISFACTION CARD
An overwhelming reaction to the Hearby app showed a general feeling of appreciation for the app's functionality to locate local, intimate music experiences but frustration with its functionality, as understood from the word cloud above. Challenges noted in the app were the lack of personalization and automation; users had trouble searching up relevant information to their preferences because of the confusing search function, lack of genre filter, and sheer amount of results. Interactive visual and audio features like the map, images, app integrations to Google Maps and Spotify, resonated very well with the users. Many participants also mentioned the idea of social functionality in being able to share events with friends, which calls back to the idea that there is an inseparable social aspect to music eventgoing.
AFFINITY DIAGRAM
I created an affinity diagram to organize reactions to the Hearby app from the conducted interviews. I sorted for 3 main categories: likes (in blue), dislikes (in red), and features that users wished for in an ideal app (green). The cards were taken from my interview notes, in which you can view where I color-coded them to fall into each category.
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​Interactive visual and audio features resonated very well with the users.
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Users found the app very informative and enjoyed learning about venues and artists while discovering new events and venues.
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Users were overwhelmed by the sheer amount of functions.
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Users want better filters and more personalization for a more streamlined way to find local events.
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IMPLICATIONS FOR DESIGN
With my app idea, my hope is to allow users to engage with Los Angeles's music scene as eventgoers situated in the specific context of Los Angeles as not only a physical location, but a historical space in which music experience is also active history making. I use Hearby's app design as my basis for re-design because it is one of very few apps that is built around discovering truly local and intimate music experiences.
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To bridge my design motivations with the event search motivations of my target users, I would like to implement a more streamlined music discovery process that caters toward the user's personalized music profile with the use of innovative filters and interactive elements (for example, music previewing, venue exploration). The interface should be familiar, like Ticketmaster, Shazam, and Yelp, as users predominantly rely on those to find local events, music, and spots, respectively, but the features should make music event discovery a completely different experience--I plan to do this by leading with audio, which was well received by users in the Hearby app. By making it more fun to find events and learn about artists and venues, this could help to support a spontaneous and easier music discovery for users while they are immersed in the physical city, alone or with friends, to be able to interact with the world around them.
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