Background
Musicians First was conceived to empower professional musicians by consolidating their creative portfolio into a single, well-structured profile page. The platform was envisaged to help industry professionals such as fixers, programmers, and bookers to easily navigate the musician directory, find the talent they required, establish contact, and share their details within and beyond their organization.
My Role
As the Lead UX Designer on this project, I was entrusted with the creation of the brand identity, the website design, user interface (UI) development, and the creation of interactive prototypes for a digital Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
Design Process and Methodology
My approach commenced with in-depth consultations with the company founders to cultivate the brand and communication vision. The logo was designed to encompass a note motif and a stylized 'm', symbolizing the steps in a musical score. One particular challenge was crafting a message that would resonate across the diverse musical genres represented by the company, where the conceptions of 'audience' and 'performance' often diverged. Ultimately, I landed on a message that appealed to a universal ambition among musicians - the desire to be heard.
In a parallel project, I collaborated with a nimble agile team to design and develop the online platform for Musicians First. Throughout the process of realizing the MVP, I maintained regular consultations with the founders, especially in the run-up to their launch at the London Jazz Festival in 2014. To validate our designs before passing them to the development team, we undertook extensive beta testing of prototypes, created in Sketch®, with industry insiders who championed our mission.
Outcome
The company successfully launched the service on schedule, garnering valuable feedback from industry professionals. This feedback steered the evolution of the platform towards a new service named DemoBox, underlining the iterative nature of UX design and the value of stakeholder consultation in shaping a product that truly meets the needs of its end users.
