Project: Booking Agent
Roles:
Research, Wireframing, Prototyping, Conducting Usability Studies, Accesibility, Visual &
Iterating Design
Duration: Mar 2015 - May 2021
Project Vision
Challenges
Booking Agent is an international community-based online platform for listing and renting local venues. It connects hosts and artists and facilitates the process of renting without owning the venue itself. Moreover it cultivates a sharing-economy by allowing property owners to rent out concert stages.
1) Create easy-to-understand data visuals for listeners.
2) Explore venues and festivals seamlessly.
3) Allow users to dive into the world of venues to gig out.
4) Bridge the gap between users sharing their venues and talent.
Starting Point
Starting off, I asked myself a few initial questions. Who is our primary user? What kind of goals do they have? Why would someone want to use this application? Just how large of a scope do I want this project to be? After interviewing six participants to establish archetypes later on, it became evident that the goals they wanted to accomplish all fell within the same categories; finding out more options to organize their concert tours easily.
Assumptions
Declaring our assumptions was imperative to the process because it would allow us to decipher what was actually accurate and what wasn't. We established a starting point where each team member had the ability to ask specific questions about our audience, issues that may arise, and how we might go about solving them.
Business Goals: How the business strives to succeed in the market
Users: Who is our audience? (Behavioral Archetypes, personas, etc.)
User Goals: What goals will the users want to accomplish when using the app?
Potential Features: How might we bridge the gap between our users and their goals?t
User Testing & Observations
Our team interview a sample of six participants when conducting research during our first sprint cycle.
Apps as Organizational Tools
A Deeper Understanding
Using apps to track statistics and events in your life is common, and 50% of participants we interviewed agreed. They stated that they use at least one app to organize events, metrics, or to-do-lists daily.
"I use a TV and movie tracker app because I like being able to view the films I've seen and plan to see at an easy glance."
The database of venues is near endless. However, 75% of participants noted they had a decent understanding of a few concert halls already, but would like to further their knowledge of them.
"I'm familiar with festivals, concert halls, and pubs, but I'm still curious to know what else is out there."
Hypothesis Statements / Backlog
After we pieced together our assumptions into hypothesis statements, we created a backlog of our work. Next, we prioritized them according to which statements had the most amount of risk and least amount of risk, so that we could work on them first to either validate, or pivot towards another idea.
- Make money by connecting artists & Venues
- Maintain users
- Make money by connecting artists & Venues
- Increase & maintain user base
- Brandon
- Christine
- Brandon
- Christine
- Book venues for touring
- Organize concerts
- Want to try new countries
- Incorporate Booking Agent to their routine
- Private concerts
- Digital portfolio
- Hire local services
- Favorites
Business
Goals
Business
Goals
Users
Users
User
Goals
User
Goals
Potential
Features
Potential
Features
Meet the users
PRIMARY
Name: Brandon
Age: 33
Family: Single, lives alone
Occupation: Bass guitarist
SECONDARY
Name: Christine
Age: 38
Family: Single, lives alone
Occupation: Bass guitarist
Brandon is a graphic designer with a busy and demanding schedule. He works for an mid-size editorial company and plays the bass for a semi-professional music band. Brandon doesn’t have the connections or accessibility to effectively organize his band shows. Brandon would like to find an easier way to organize tours for his project.
Christine is a full time bass player with a busy and demanding schedule. She works in her professional musical project as a bass guitar player. Christine has limited access to connections to effectively organize her project shows. Christine would like to find an easier way to organize events for her project.
Navigation Model
Low Resolution Ideation
Working through a couple really preliminary sketches, I realized some of the ideas and layouts that I was thinking of just wouldn't work. Not only was I able to quickly communicate some of the ideas I had a hard time explaining, but I was also able to take them and spark more discussions as well as quickly filter the good and bad ideas out.
Wireflow
The final high-fidelity prototype presented cleaner user flows for booking a venue. It also met user needs for more customization.
Style Guide
Using warm feeling and comfortable colors, helped convey the feeling of comfort to our users in Booking Agent. Shades of gray, red, and black are present almost everywhere throughout the world in some aspect, so it paired well with the idea of night clubs and venues coming from everywhere across the globe.. The main typeface of choice for the app is Roboto. I wanted to select a sans-serif typeface that would bode well with the rounded edges within our interface, as well as the black/white contrast inside of the app.
Colors
#231F20
#453C3
#635757
#9A8D8D
#C4C3C3
#4766B0
#FFFFFF
#D12D17
Type
13pt - Medium, Roboto
13pt - Bold, Roboto
20pt - Regular, Roboto
20pt - Bold, Roboto
24pt - Bold, Roboto
Buttons
Normal
Pressed
#D12D17
#9A2717
Logo
Challenge
International Exploration
With so many venues and festivals on this world, it would be near impossible for someone to individually search for each one. We attempted to solve this issue by creating a browse feature with numerous filters and categories. With this, we believe users will be able to find exactly what they are looking for.
Takeaways
Booking Agent made me realize just how difficult it can be to produce an application that complex. Even though I had much knowledge about music business coming into the project, it became problematic when designing around a few screens. Luckily, I acted as somewhat of a SME (Subject Matter Expert) and was able to guide the direction of my process. This made me realize just how important it is to have known A LOT about the subject of the app you are developing in order to create a well-rounded experience for both first-timers and veterans.
Reach out to me
contact@fariasfernando.com
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