Encore is an app for concert-goers and music-lovers. Designed to combat the never-ending struggle to capture, organize, and relive live music experiences in a meaningful way, Encore's primary feature recalls past concerts to remind users of their long-dormant memories.
Bei Hu
Oct—Dec 2024
7 weeks
Madison Wang
Christine Jung
Michelle Chen
Figma
After Effects
User Research
Interviews
Usability Testing
Prototyping
Visual Design
Concert-goers struggle to capture, organize, and relive their live music experiences in a meaningful way. This makes it challenging to preserve the excitement and emotions of live music while fostering a sense of community.
Based on this initial planning, our original problem space was discovered: "Concert-goers face a dilemma: record videos to preserve memories or immerse themselves fully in the experience."
We decided to focus our demographic primarily on college-aged students as it was our best chance to gain accurate results.
Understand the motivations and behaviors of concert-goers when it comes to recording and sharing concert content.
Identify the pain points users face with existing platforms when trying to upload, organize, or discover concert photos and videos
Explore user preferences for browsing and interacting with concert content to inform features that encourage engagement on the platform.
We researched eight competitors. We compiled all our information into a comparison chart to get a better overview on what is missing in the current market.
While many apps had a good grasp on one or two of the areas we were looking for, there was never a concert-specific solution from our direct competitors.
Then choosing two competitors, we performed a usability audit including user task flows, user testing, and finally a heuristic evaluation. Using our findings, we found the primary task features that users had the most issues with.
We conducted a total of ten interviews, got 61 survey results, and created a participation observation guide.
We wanted to understand what our users value when it comes to the balance between living in the moment and recording memories, later tying that into the most significant ways they use/share this content.
A majority of users capture content for themselves based off of personal preferences in songs/unique live experience.
The lack of content organization contributes to the reason users don’t look back on their past content that often.
While users acknowledge recording is a necessity for a full live experience, they still prioritize being present.
Reviewing/rewatching content occurs right after the concert event happens, otherwise, the user forgets about it unless prompted.
Users are not interested in connecting with other concert-goers, and prioritize being with their own friends.
Our research led us to mainly explore the idea of enriching the in-person concert experience. We saw a clear need with struggling to balance wanting to record enough content to satisfy fully capturing a concert and wanting to completely immerse themselves in the live environment to feel present.
User Needs Statement:
Concert goers need a way to capture memories of the experience so that they are not taking away from their live experience.
It was only after we synthesized our data that we realized that vision we had needed to rely more on how the content was used after the experiences happen. We needed to come up with a feature that the user has more control in and doesn't feel the need to sacrifice their personal concert routines to use.
Based on our interviews, we created two user personas. We decided to focus on how each persona differs when it comes to recording memories for themselves.
For this scenario, we focus on a journey where Aliyah relies on her friends to gain personal content from a concert she recently attended. We put emphasis on sharing and community as well as a place to store/organize content.
After analyzing this potential direction, we realized that our features were turning towards the direction of a social media app for concert-goers. That was not something we were interested in pursuing as there are already too many platforms that our users would share to first.
Concert-goers need a way to log and document their live music experiences, and preserve the details of each moment for future reflection.
Concert-goers need an effective way to organize their concert content, easily access, share, and make meaningful use of their videos and photos.
Music lovers need a platform where they can view, download, and engage with concert videos shared by others, fostering a sense of connection and community.
Concert-goers want a way to reminisce and look back on their concert memories, preserving the excitement and emotions of live music experiences.
As a team, we came up with four different ideas for potential directions we could go in. These included more tangible sketches, task flows, and thumbnails that gave us a better grasp at what our app could look like.
We kept coming up with different ideas and organizing it in a creative matrix helped us diversify our thinking (digital, non-digital, realistic, imaginative, etc.). With sixteen total ideas, we put them into a prioritization matrix based on effort vs. impact.
We realized that such a niche feature needed to have a high enough impact for our users to stay curious long-term. With the sacrifice of having to continuously put personal content into the app, we decided Encore was still the idea that struck the right balance.
We created a basic user flow framework to base our wireframing decisions off of. During each step, we made sure to do extensive user testing and iterate based on our feedback.
A flow showing the process users’ would go through when uploading or posting the content they have from concerts.
During this stage, we focused on general user flow and how intuitive the overall app was as well as creating a set system for navigation and finalizing where each element takes priority. Our feedback was that there wasn't an obvious flow.
We then moved on to more detailed feedback and specific tasks, adding small prototyped elements. Most of our feedback from this stage was confusion over icons, so we focused on making the app feel standardized with components usually seen in existing apps.
As we neared our final prototype, we made some big design pivots and tried our best to simplify the UI. Design-wise, we chose to emulate the feeling of concert environments which resulted in a fun and colorful final product. Our biggest iteration was with what should constitute as our home page, going between an emphasis on personal versus community
home
Categorize, search, and log your personal concerts on your profile. All your content is organized clearly to easily look back on.
View your content
Choose between gallery or scroll view to reminisce on your old content. Toggle photos or videos to streamline your viewing process.
community
Share chosen content with close friends. Interact and engage with other people's posts to stay updated with their experiences.
encore
Press the Encore button to get a randomized concert highlight from any of your logged concerts!
How to take research to a further level, translating it into a prototype. Understanding how to implement user feedback.
How to work as a team, using our individual strengths to further areas of the project as well as how to most effectively split up the work.
We would target a larger demographic for our surveys/interviews to gain better insights on a broader range of perspectives.
Better communication and time management when it came closer to deadlines, as it would effect quality of research at some points.
We would want to create an even more detailed prototype and flesh out the whole app to make it interactive as there are still a lot of missing features.
Understanding and implementing more logistical aspects of our primary features including timing, frequency, and technical limitations.
