PledgeMusic
Andy Foster & Martin O’Dea
PledgeMusic
OUGD603
Background: PledgeMusic is a company that facilitates crowd funding for musicians to allow them to finance the recording and production of their music. This allows users to be part of the creation of the album. In exchange for pledging money to the artist, they receive constant updates throughout the campaign and an eventual reward which is dependant on the amount pledged. This aims to involve fans more transparently in the ‘music industry’, altering the fan-musician relationship in a way that hopes to bring them closer together for mutual benefit. Concise Brief: Help pledge to realise its full potential by updating its design and usability, allowing it to compete more effectively in the digital market. Brief: Use design to help PledgeMusic become a thriving modern solution to the necessity of record labels within the music industry. Its full potential is to allow musicians to independently release music, funded instead by their own fans.To do this we need to vastly improve its design and usability, allowing it to compete more effectively in this market. Competitors in the field, such as Kickstarter, are much more design orientated and this could be a barrier for potential new users. Clarity is key, and pledge could be doing more to better communicate its model to both artists and fans. Concept: Create a user-friendly interface for pledge that uses simple, clear design. There should be a particular focus on mobile users and the ways that pledge can communicate their model clearly to users. Tone of Voice: Clear Friendly Welcoming Influences: Kickstarter Mixlr Mixcloud Twitter Music Hype Machine Soundcloud
Martin O’Dea (collab with Andy Foster)
Brief
OUGD603
Analysis On the first day of the brief, the aim was to gain as broad a knowledge around Pledge as possible. To do this, design sprint methods were employed in a series of 10 minute rounds to investigate the the crowdfunding market and the comapny vision of PledgeMusic. This investigation allowed the application of these ideas to examine the problems with the current site and identify areas where it could be doing more to engage with its audience. Here is a summary of the analysis that formed the basis of the direction of the project: Positive areas to promote: The most creative and exciting way to get your music to your fans. A team that will guide you through the process. You invest in the future of music. If you don’t see you favourite artist on pledge, contact them. Invite your fans into your journey . Each project is personally asses by a team member Partnerships with major players iTunes for the super fan Negatives aspects of the current site: Ugly colours Gradients Garish colours Bad style Full bleed boxes Too crowded Not clever enough - not using website potential Not many projects shown on front page Scroll glitch Social brand inconsistency Confusing to navigate Too much body copy
Martin O’Dea (collab with Andy Foster)
Analysis
OUGD603
Development By breaking down the project into smaller areas, we were able to take each aspect of site and put it through a rigorous development process. Working independently, we conducted rounds of 5 and 10 minute sprints to sketch out multiple possible solutions to each identified area. Here are some of my design sheets showing development of interface elements and user interaction. Our focus here was to refine the design in detail entirely on paper, allowing us to focus on usability as opposed to aesthetics and avoid being too precious over ideas at this stage. This gave us a huge combined bank of ideas which could be developed on and assessed against our reseearch findings. Due to the way we approached this stage of the project, we spent less time making visual design choices later on and were able to focus on building a functional site design.
Martin O’Dea (collab with Andy Foster)
Development
OUGD603
Conflict Resolution The next stage of the design sprint was to look for areas where we had conflicting solutions to a problem and resolve them through compromise or reconsideration. To do this, we pinned up all of our design sheets from the process and went through each one by one, marking conflicts with a post-it note and discussing possible resolutions. This proved to be an effective method for me as we were able to make links between ideas from different parts of the design process that wouldn’t normally be displayed together, leading to more conisdered and interesting deisgn decisions.
Martin O’Dea (collab with Andy Foster)
Research
OUGD603
Pledge Card Format From unifying the interface elements on paper, we only had to digitise our mockups and make choices about colour and typography. This was a refreshing way of working as each apect felt thoroughly conisdered and nothing was spontaneously decided on the computer. Many of our ideas about how users should interact with the new site were based around a familiar and conistant format for information about a Pledge project which we called the ‘Pledge Card’, this would be found all over the site and remove the user confusion that hinders the existing interface. While Andy figured out exact measurements for the unit, I was able to digitise and develop the Pledge Card format until we were both happy with the colours, type and structure. We describe this as: ‘All you need to know about a campaign at a glance. Pledge Cards utilise large imagery, pefect for album artwork. Clean, colourful, simple.’
Martin O’Dea (collab with Andy Foster)
Research
OUGD603
Designing the UI Using a strict grid, I was able to lay out the UI structure which we could both work on, using dropbox to ensure we were both working on the same file. All of the UI was put together using actual projects from the current Pledge site to provide as realistic a redesign project as possible. Pledge’s brand colour of blue has been used throughout the layout, with a honey yellow highlight to attarct attention. The open-source typeface PT sans provides a really simple type treatment that suits the minimalist functional design that we have appleid to this project.
Martin O’Dea (collab with Andy Foster)
Research
OUGD603
Pledge is the most creative and exciting way to get your music to your fans. By reimagining PledgeMusic, the service is able to realise its potential as the world’s leading direct-to-fan music platform
Martin O’Dea (collab with Andy Foster)
Features
OUGD603
Make it a Feature Projects can now stand out from the crowd on the front page by double-sizing. Double content boxes draw attention to a project through large artist imagery and an instant description.
Triple-size for video Videos can now be embedded in the home page with triple content boxes. Allow artists to tell their story directly in the Pledge Card.
Martin O’Dea (collab with Andy Foster)
Features
OUGD603
Reward your pledgers Expandible reward cards give fans a better Pledge experience. Cards flip to reveal additional images, descriptions and videos. Gold cards highlight rewards that are exclusive to PledgeMusic.
Martin O’Dea (collab with Andy Foster)
Features
OUGD603
Introducing the Pledge Journey Bar Have access to all project updates in one timeline Users can transport to any milestone of the project Shifts the focus away from individual updates and towards the artist’s journey.
Martin O’Dea (collab with Andy Foster)
Features
OUGD603
Martin O’Dea (collab with Andy Foster)
Final Design
OUGD603
Martin O’Dea (collab with Andy Foster)
Final Design
OUGD603
Mock it up We created an interactive prototype to allow us to send a working model to PledgeMusic for feedback. This prototype can be found on our blogs.
Get responsive We also demonstrated how the Pledge card format could be applied across mobile devices. Swiping between cards would allow the user to browse rows of content and get information at a glance.
Martin O’Dea (collab with Andy Foster)
Final Design
OUGD603