Discovering Talent
Emerging hip-hop artists struggle to be discovered in today’s music industry. With a seemingly infinite number of platforms to host and share music, there’s no obvious place for new artists to connect with listeners. This is how America’s Hot 5 can put the power of American Idol & The Voice into the hands of everyday people.
America’s Hot 5 is a rising startup that is striving to help talented emerging artists find an audience. By leveraging the power of crowdsourcing, America’s Hot 5 provides a social platform for hip-hop artists to upload content, giving consumers (Judges) the power to discover new music and vote these artists into recognition.
Our team of 2 designers worked with our client to bring their app concept to a presentable, prototype state for upcoming seed round meetings with potential investors. For this project we pushed ourselves to learn Abstract, a new version control tool that enables simultaneous collaboration on Sketch App design files.
Our team of 2 designers worked with our client to bring their app concept to a presentable, prototype state for upcoming seed round meetings with potential investors. For this project we pushed ourselves to learn Abstract, a new version control tool that enables simultaneous collaboration on Sketch App design files.
Goals
Deliver designs and prototypes that serve as a proof-of-concept for our client’s vision.
Responsibilities
Research, user flow development, content strategy, design, testing
Deliver designs and prototypes that serve as a proof-of-concept for our client’s vision.
Responsibilities
Research, user flow development, content strategy, design, testing
Timeline
6 Weeks
Team
2 Designers
6 Weeks
Team
2 Designers
New Designs
A Home Screen to get Users Listening and Voting - Fast
When users open the app, they’re immediately presented with a home feed of artist submitted music. This gets our ‘Judges’ listening and voting right away.
We found through testing that this level of immediacy is a key trend in today’s mobile app landscape.
A Competition Page with Trending Artists and Music
A key trait of AH5, recurring competitions help bring new and upcoming artists to the spotlight.
Users can visit the competition page to see the trending artists of the week, and listen & vote on the top contenders.
Onboarding Flow with Tooltips for New Users
America’s Hot 5 presents new users with a straightforward signup flow for both artists and listeners.
Easy to digest tooltips make it easy to contribute to the platform, whether it be exploring music or voting others to the top.
A Straightfoward Sign Up Experience & Upload Wizard for Artists
An easy onboarding experience is a must for engaging new users. We created a sign up flow that is not only a breeze for new listeners, but easy for contributing artists as well.
This encourages artists to get content on the platform right off the bat.
Client Vision
A platform for aspiring artists to create a profile and upload music, where consumers (Judges) can listen to uploads and vote on tracks, giving artists a chance to win a recurring competition and gain recognition.
Project Requirements
The core of America’s Hot 5 is a social platform where emerging artists can market and share their music with listeners.
On the other side, those listeners will have the power to vote these artists into a recurring competition of top trending artists.
On the other side, those listeners will have the power to vote these artists into a recurring competition of top trending artists.
America’s Hot 5 is built on two main user types, each with their own pain points, goals, and needs:
Artists: Hip-hop artists & creators that can upload music to their profile to be discovered and heard by users and fans.
Judges:Everyday users that can explore the platform & listen to new music, with the power to vote on tracks and influence upcoming trends.
Artists: Hip-hop artists & creators that can upload music to their profile to be discovered and heard by users and fans.
Judges:Everyday users that can explore the platform & listen to new music, with the power to vote on tracks and influence upcoming trends.
Research
Market Competitors
We kicked off market research by identifying 4 substantial competitors.
The Voice and American Idol are well known American music competitions in the US. However, they are predominantly hosted as a television program and their mobile apps are only used in conjuction to their main focus, which is TV.
NME Emerging and SpinnUP are both web platforms that have a similar mission to help musicians get discovered. They also lack mobile apps, which is a differentiator for our platform, as mobile presence is a must in today’s landscape.
SpinnUP does not offer a competition to win money or studio time, and while NME Emerging does, they have a pre-selected panel of judges.
This is presents a unique chance to put the power of the vote in the fans.
The Voice and American Idol are well known American music competitions in the US. However, they are predominantly hosted as a television program and their mobile apps are only used in conjuction to their main focus, which is TV.
NME Emerging and SpinnUP are both web platforms that have a similar mission to help musicians get discovered. They also lack mobile apps, which is a differentiator for our platform, as mobile presence is a must in today’s landscape.
SpinnUP does not offer a competition to win money or studio time, and while NME Emerging does, they have a pre-selected panel of judges.
This is presents a unique chance to put the power of the vote in the fans.
Key Takeaways
Give control to the listeners, making them feel impactful on the platform
&
Help artists feel like they are being discovered, giving them a shot at a tangible competition
User Personas
Focus Areas
We analyzed our user flows and market research to prioritize 5 major focus areas for a minimum viable product that satisfies our client needs:
Dedicated Artist and Judge profiles
Separate sign up flows to create Artist or Judge profiles, each with distict functionality.
Easily discover artists and music
Home pages that promote new & hot music on the platform.
Vote on tracks
Give Judges the power to easily vote on music and influence trends.
Competition page
A place for users to view top contenders for a recurring competition on the platform.
Follow artists
Emphasize the social aspect by letting Judges follow favorite artists and share music with friends.
Design and Build
User Flows
With our user personas developed and a firm understanding of our project requirements, we mapped out some initial workflows for our user types.
Wireframing
We jumped on the whiteboard for some initial wireframing of our user flows.
This helped us map out some of the key interface differences between the Artist and Judge experience.
This helped us map out some of the key interface differences between the Artist and Judge experience.
Paper Wireframing came next, helping us realize the vision of our focus areas and accompanying user flows.
Initial Mockups
After solidifying our ideas on paper, our team collaborated on Figma in real time to digitize our wireframes.
High Fidelity | Too Soon?
With an investor meeting right around the corner, our client requested we push our designs into high fidelity mockups.
Account creation flow for Artists & Judges
Artist Profiles - Upload Content
Initial designs for uploading tracks to artist profiles on the platform.
Judge Navigation - Vote on Tracks
Initial screens for listening to artist tracks and voting for them on the platform.
We also created a competition page for Judges to see the top trending tracks in a competition cycle.
User Testing
With initial investor presentations complete, we started testing our designs on both Artists and Judges, noting feedback from interviews and task observations.
Major Takeaways
- Users were discouraged by the clutter of the homepage, and expected a more direct view for listening and voting on tracks.
- Users didn’t have enough guidance on the core voting mechanics of Artist submissions, and didn’t feel impactful when influencing the popularity of songs.
- Artists tended to be discouraged by the account creation flow.
- Almost all users requested cleaner, more modern visual design throughout the prototype.
Simplifying the Final Designs
With investor meetings and user testing complete, we incorporated our general feedback to substantially reduce our prototype.
We needed to condense into a simple design that does one thing well:
We needed to condense into a simple design that does one thing well:
Make it easy for Judges to hear and vote on submitted tracks.
The app landing page gets users listening right away
Testing showed that users were more engaged if opening the app got them right into listening tracks.
Judges opening the app are now presented with an immediate feed of artist submitted music.
From here, it’s easy to upvote a track, see artist info, skip track, like, and share.
A cleaner and less demanding sign up flow for artists
Our new artist onboarding allows artists to populate their profile and upload music in a more streamlined wizard.
Artists can also point to tracks hosted on SoundCloud and Spotify, linking their AH5 profile with existing online presence.
Tooltips for users exploring the platform for the first time
Following the signup flow, we present users with short but helpful overview of the platform and basics to get started with listening and voting.
Digestible competition page for Judges to watch & impact the weekly trends
A refined competition page presents trending artists, with intuitive buttons for viewing profiles, playing tracks, and voting.
Outcomes
Next Steps
We passed on the high fidelity designs back to a satisfied client, and roadmapped a number of next design steps for the project:
Expand the social platform
Create opportunities for messaging between profiles, following artists, and potentially a home feed to see updates from artists and judges.
A Web client for artists
Give artists a dashboard to manage their AH5 profile from their browser.
Video hosting and image gallery Artist profiles would benefit from Video hosting for music videos and vlog updates, and could use a gallery for more photo uploads as well.
Learnings
This was a practical opportunity to learn Figma as a collaboration design tool. This experience set me up for using Figma in projects in the future, as well as reinforcing a somewhat “universal design editing language”
As for the project: due to client needs for investor pitches, we were pushed to create high fidelity too soon in the design process.
More focus on user testing during this time would have allowed us to build out a more engaging Lo-Fi prototype, which would probably have been more impactful to showcase.