"Astro is a music service for up-and-coming creators. It helps them build an advertising campaign and reach an audience more organically."
CORE PROBLEM
Under the current model of streaming services, up-and-coming musicians have a hard time gaining traction and monthly listeners. Even those growing in popularity are grossly underpaid by these services. Musicians are forced to rely on merchandise and concert sales to make a living.
RESEARCH QUESTION
Under the current model of streaming services, up-and-coming musicians have a hard time gaining traction and monthly listeners. Even those growing in popularity are grossly underpaid by these services. Musicians are forced to rely on merchandise and concert sales to make a living.
RESEARCH RESULTS
• Artists struggle with self promotion
• Artists who are designers might also struggle with perfectionism
• "Feedback Loop" - Experience during a live show of interchanging feedback
• Creating music is most important but promotion is also a product that has to be created.
• "Hardcore" fans want to purchase merchandise or physical media from smaller artists to support them
• Fans aren't particularly interested in a personal experience with every artist they like
Empathy Map
"There's this like interaction between you and the fans while you're preforming. It's like a feedback loop. You can look out, you don't see any particular person's reaction but you get a general feeling, an energy tell you how they feel about your performance."
-Ellis Anderson (Paraphrased)
RESEARCH METHODS
This research was gathered from two long-form interviews. One with a "Hardcore" music fan and one with an up-and-coming musician. I also asked quick questions to other music fans. I'm a "Hardcore" music fan myself and have also been in a band before. All of this informed my work.
As-Is and To-Be Maps
After using an Empathy Map to better understand my user persona, I used an As-Is to understand my personas experience in this system as it is today. This was useful to me because it revealed a number of systematic issues that I might not have considered without. For many of the same reasons the To-Be helped me to thing more systematically and more cohesively about how my persona interacted with the system.
Guerilla Testing
During one of our class sessions at the College of Design we did a quick "thinking aloud" session to test our lo-fi wireframes. Here I learned that combining elements from different services could actually confuse users because with those elements come assumptions about the user experience.
HOME PAGE
Illustrations and small captions inform the user. The brand is well developed here and leaves the user with a good impression of the company.
Quick sign up gets the user into the program and invested quickly. They can go straight into browsing artists pages or set up a pro account. Cosmo, Astro's conversational user interface (right) helps the user finish setting up their account.
This is the first page of the Astro Pro Content Studio. Here creatives will recognize a toolbar and text editor tools. These are present in all of the studio screens where visual content is created.
In Brand Campaign artists can use templates and photography to create their own advertisements for social media.
One way that fans can find an artists Astro Page is the support plugin for Spotify.
The mobile app is a light version of the tools available in the website. But it is more focused on keeping up to date with community involvement and store success. There aren't any content creation tools here.
Brand
Poster
The poster incorporates all elements of the brand. It also adds illustrations and leads the user to the website.
