Hometown Heroes Community: Facilitating mentorship and music gig opportunities for emerging musicians
Project Overview
This project is an offshoot of the Hometown Heroes Radio of Delaware Public Media, a weekly show spotlighting local musical talent.
To serve a similar purpose, we designed a community platform that connects budding musicians with seasoned ones, and facilitates mentorship, self-promotion, and finding opportunities!
Role
Product Designer and Strategist
Team
5 UX Designers
Skills
Mixed-methods UX Research
Visual Design (UI and Design System)
Systems thinking and Product Strategy
Duration
5 months
My contribution
Hands-on in each aspect of the end-to-end process
My key contributions:
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Led the creation of the Design System + tracking component requests
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Organizing project assets for easy access and collaboration
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Conducted 4 out of 6 interviews + 1 user testing session
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Shaped the 'opportunities' feature - revenue model, information architecture, wireframes, prototype and specifications document
I worked with at least one teammate in creating the competetive audit, affinity map, user journey map, and revenue model. This was a collaborative process. We equally collaborated on visual design (referencing and ideation), wireframes, information architecture, prototyping and client meetings.
A little context before we begin
The client, the creator of Hometown Heroes Radio(HH), an advocate of local talent, wanted to extend his support to musicians beyond the radio show. The show solely features artists local to Delaware Valley and aims to give them visibility. It has built a community of 3000+ musicians - most of them have featured on the show.
The client believes visibility is not enough for professional growth in music. You must build connections too.
This is where we come in!
The challenge
How can we help local musicians of Delaware Valley grow their careers?*
* while ensuring that the solution is not heavy on musicians' pockets
* and making revenue-generating digital product
* by expanding the HH community
The solution
A community-focused platform offering mentorship and gig opportunities by leveraging the established Hometown Heroes Radio network.
The prototype at a glance
Picture yourself as Jane, an up-and-coming artist aiming to level-up her music to score a spot at the RockRaid Festival.
To immerse yourself in this prototype, you could complete the following tasks:
You want to sharpen your Guitar skills - find a mentor and book a session with them.
Guitar skills have been sharpened. Now - find and apply to an appropriate gig for your newfound skills
The gig was amazing! Time to give back- leave a review for your Guitar mentor, and cancel your session with Leo!
Results
80% satisfaction rate
After doing the final usability testing of the platform with real artists in the area, we got user satisfaction rate of over 90%.
0 → 1 Product Design
The project let me handle every aspect of product creation, from research to hand-off, going beyond design to include strategy and revenue modeling.
Client buy-in
The client and the HH community we spoke to were impressed with the product. The client has initiated fundraising and engaged legal connections.
Overarching Research Question
How do aspiring local artists navigate their early careers, and challenges, and how to best support them?
1. Primary Research
We conducted unstructured interviews with 6 participants to gauge their experiences.
We asked how they
Produce music
Promote themselves
Find new opportunities and network
Use technology in their work
Participant breakdown
2 early-career musicians
1 self-managing seasoned musician
1 seasoned artist signed with a label
1 Artist Manager
Data Collected
5 hours of video recordings
Transcripts
Interview notes
HMW Notes
2. Market Research
We analyzed the landscape for tools available to help Musicians
Things we found that helped us later
- Various revenues streams from top websites - memberships, pay-per-post, ads, commisions, etc
- People largely meet each other and form bands on Facebook groups
- Tools like Reverbnation empower artists to manage their own promotion and find gigs, but there is no direction on how to in succeed doing that.
The process
We worked in 5 sprints spanned across 5 months. Here's an overview
Primary Solution (also our USP)
Facilitating mentorship in music*
* by connecting emerging and seasoned artists with each other for guidance
* generating client revenue without burdening emerging artists.
Secondary Solution
Facilitate networking* among musicians and organizers
* to easily find band members, collaborators and musical gigs
* while generating revenue through external stakeholders other than artists
Initial User Flows
We created basic mentor and mentee user flows to chalk out the mentorship feature
How much are mentees willing to pay?
How do we incorporate paid sessions into the flow?
What kind of sessions and topics are artists interested in?
How much do mentors want to charge?
Are virtual sessions like ADPlist a thing in Music?
Are mentors willing to form a long-term relationship with mentees?
Key Findings
We identified the key stakeholders, their aspirations and pain points.
want guidance through different points in their journey
but struggle to find a reliable mentor
Emerging Arists
want visibility and credibility to find more work
it's hard to achieve without experience
Emerging Arists
want to network to form bands and opportunities
current methods like social media, GigFinder, etc are too fragmented
Emerging Arists
want to give back to the community by guiding early-career artists
but wish they could make it a source of income too
Seasoned Arists
wants to achieve..
but..!
Stakeholder
want a roster of artists they can hire fast and easily
it's hard to quickly find reliable and verified talent specific to their needs
Venues
3. Processing research data
We further consolidated the research data to draw commonalities
Affinity Map
Artist Journey Map
Feature integration
We combined mentorship and networking features, along with their revenue model.
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Stakeholder research
We interviewed an artist manager to understand the process of booking talent, to find gaps we can fill, while forming a secondary revenue source
Venues are willing to pay for the perfect talent
Finding and booking talent is tedious and venues often don't have a dedicated person for it.
HH can facilitate bringing all opportunites and artists together under one umbrella
1
Venues (that don't join HH) can pay a nominal fee to post an ad to find artists
2
Managers struggle to get paid for gigs they arrange
When they're a middle agent, either the artist or the venue often default on payments
Platform become the payment gateway between two parties
HH can take a small % cut from each transaction
Venues value social proof
Venues/Organizers can vary in scale, but they want money-making artists on their radar. Social proof gives credibility
3
Reviews from previous clientele, with samples of work can help vet the musician
Insight
Implementation
1
Revenue
Opportunity
Integrating both solutions
Merging mentorship and networking
Proof of concept
To validate our ideas, we conducted a user survey and concept testing sessions to identify issues, opportunities and possible adoption of mentorship feature
Insights from survey and concept testing (44 Responses)
High interest in Mentorship
Over 95% of survey respondents are interested in participating in the mentorship program.
In-person mentorship preferred
Learning new skills often involves one-or one or group jamming sessions.
$50/hr is the going rate
People are willing to pay in the range of $50-$100 per hour for mentorship!
Copyright awareness
Adding a disclaimer emphasizing the importance of copyright for shared music.
Non-Monetary Mentor Benefits
Considering non-monetary benefits like featuring mentors on Hometown Heroes or in interviews, expanding social recognition and appreciation beyond monetary incentives.
Creative. Energetic. Relieable
We created a token-based design system to facilitate developer hand-off. Link
Initial wireframing
We created wireframes based on the ideas above
Business Model
We explored a mix of commission market place and freemium model to monetize mentorship feature
Commision cut whenever a paid mentorship session is booked
We decided to charge a nominal fee for booking a mentorship session through our platform.
Every mentor has to have 10 free sessions before they start charging
Free sessions can be used by struggling artists that are tight on money, and gives a chance to mentor to build their credibility before they start charging.
What I learned
Strategizing a product
Creating a new product from scratch taught me about product strategy, revenue modeling, and user flows. I focused on meticulous details eg. messaging functionality and content visibility.
Domain immersion can be unconventional
To better understand the music industry, local talent, and monetization, we explored documentaries, podcasts, and a Netflix show. Ideas can come from anywhere.
Research can lead to unexpected places.
When we started this project, I never thought we’d end up with a mentorship platform as our primary product that could help local artists. We found this avenue because of our user interviews.
Overdesigning is a thing
The Information Architecture diagram can tell you how detailed things got. After a point, we had to decide where to stop when designing the first iteration of a product.
Final Design
The final solution is an integration of mentorship and opportunities features into a Hometown Heroes Community platform
A common homepage for all members brings all features under the same umbrella.
Tailored gigs acc. to your talents
If you are a singer, you won't see Guitar gigs. Suggestions tailored to your talents and experience
Become a mentor
If you aren't already, you can apply to be a mentor here!
Mentorship
Get started with your mentorship journey here. You're also allowed to tailor suggestions your needs.
Getting you excited with data!
Slight gamification - your activity in numbers motivates more use - improving retention rates!
Managing commitments made easy
The first thing you see, making it harder to miss appointments!
Feature 1
Explore mentors and book mentorship sessions
This feature of the platform helps local music artists find the right mentor for guidance. Mentorship sessions can be 1:1 or group with the option of its mode being virtual or in-person.
Feature 2
Explore and post music gigs & opportunities
This feature helps artists find curated music gigs posted by local entities as well as post a community opportunity when in need of band members or collaborators.
Feature 3
Track and manage all of sessions and gigs at one place
We've also included trackers for mentorship sessions and music gigs that can help users manage all of their activities easily on the platform.
