Find the right performing musicians in one place.
Having live music at your event enhances its ambiance while providing interactive entertainment that playing recorded tracks can’t.
But when you’re hiring real human beings rather than just playing audio, there’s a few extra factors to consider beyond how good the music sounds, such as:
Rates and payment methods
Extra special equipment they might need
Their stage presence and personalities
Whether they can and want to engage with the audience or not
Problem: A local musician’s info is typically scattered across multiple social media profiles and websites. Scouring through it all can result in an inconvenient user journey. And once a musician has been found, the booking and scheduling process can be complex.
“How might we design an app that gathers a musician’s crucial details — which is currently found in fragmented sources — all in one place so that event coordinators can choose and hire the right musicians much faster and more conveniently?”
Project overview
Built for: a Google UX Designer Certificate course
My role: product designer, user researcher
Target audience: event coordinators representing organizations from small community organizations to large corporations, anyone who needs to hire live music for their event such as a wedding, musicians seeking work
Duration: 1 month in January 2023, revised May 2024 and Jan 2025 to accommodate updates in tech such as generative AI tools
Tools used:
Note: The flows mocked up for this project represent the business/hiring side only, not the musician’s side
The significance and impact of live music:
It would be a dream to book Beyoncé to light up your local pizza festival and wow your whole city, but this is probably out of your league (for now 😉). Most everyday events, such as weddings, festivals, fairs, carnivals, tend to hire smaller, local musicians that won’t cost a few body parts but can still deliver an engaging, exciting, talented performance to liven up the atmosphere.
Why not just play recorded audio? Well, studies show that there are physical and mental health benefits to experiencing live music:
Stimulating oxytocin and dopamine
Gathering with other people in person fosters a sense of social connectedness, especially if the musicians engage with the audience and come from the same community
Facilitating networking and socializing among attendees
The common interest in the music can serve as a conversation starter and icebreaker
Draws publicity to the artist, venue, community, and event
“How might we build a tool to help people and businesses enhance their event’s ambiance and fulfill their objective with live music?”
A deeper look into the journey of hiring musicians online
I began my user research with secondary research through articles, social media, forums, and other studies, including this survey, on the process of booking musicians online.
These were the most common pain points:
Finding artists within budget and price transparency
Responsiveness, or lack thereof
Can’t tell if the artist sounds good live or not
Availability: couldn’t tell if bands were booked or not
Finding the kind of artist the user is looking for
Worries the artist may attract the wrong audience for the event
Artist may unknowingly have a harmful reputation or values
Awareness of the musician and their choice to play at an event is often dependent on the organizer’s social connections
💼 📈 Taking business needs into account: For this app, business needs largely overlap with user needs. But if the user is hiring a musician on behalf of a business, they may put extra weight on:
Attracting new visitors (for public events)
Increasing revenue
Alignment with organizational values and vibe
Relationship with their source of funding for the musicians, such as investors, sponsors, or donors
“The problem is not finding musicians that want to play, the problem is finding musicians that will be a draw enough people to make the event successful at a price the promoter/venue can afford.”
⚠️ Possible biases and constraints to consider
A designer creating an app for event coordinators to book live musicians may face challenges due to personal biases. In designing this, I wanted to note a possible potential limitation: my own limited experience in attending music with live events, including my lack of interest in much of the live music being featured.
Most events I’ve attended with live music were often community events intended to bolster support for a marginalized community, thus prospective users in such situations would have distinct needs that other users may not have, and vice versa. Unsurprisingly, most users who I surveyed for this project also had only booked musicians for smaller, communal events such as weddings and fundraisers.
This bias can lead to an app that doesn't fully address the needs of a broader range of events, such as corporate functions, or private parties. I did some research on how to mitigate this bias and decided to ensure that I was not limiting my range of events to my personal experiences, which meant empathizing with user journeys that differed from what I was familiar with. I also used ChatGPT to help create unfamiliar personas and user journeys.
So what do users and businesses look for in the right musicians? What are their goals?
Below is a summary of typical user and business needs and concerns I discovered through secondary and primary user research.
🙁
It seemed like most users were currently using social media or established industry connection to book artists rather than apps like this, so I unfortunately found little information about the details of current tool usage beyond social media and emails.
🎶 Artist sound + image
How the band sounds live — just because their music sounds beautiful doesn’t mean they can perform well!
Confident, engaging, friendly stage presence — or whatever persona the event needs them to be, be it warm or brooding.
Their sound and personality should be appealing to the target audience, not just the event producers
Does the artist's image reflect the company's values and brand message?
🚙 Logistics
Does the venue have size and capacity for the artist's stage setup and equipment needs?
Is the artist available on the event date, and does their tour schedule allow for travel and setup time?
How close is the artist to my event? If the artist isn't local, consider travel expenses and potential logistical issues.
Will the artist have any logistical requirements from us?
💸 Expenses
What’s the event budget?
Is the artist charging by hour? Song? Project?
Are there any fees outside of their usual rates?
Will the artist need any other accommodations?
What happens if the artist has to cancel?
🤔 Other
Would a well-known artist generate more excitement, or would a lesser-known, talented band be more cost-effective?
If the artist has a professional website, social media presence, and good communication skills, it’ll make the researching and hiring process smoother
A more in-depth look at our prospective users
I used the information above to put together user personas and a journey map featuring common but diverse user journeys and needs, taking into account a wide range of events contrasting in theme and cultural background.
The main two user personas I’m focusing on for this project are:
Professional event coordinators
People of any background putting together private events, such as weddings.
💼📈 Taking business needs into account: The following two personas are hiring musicians on behalf of organizations, thus their user needs reflect their organization’s needs of improving the organization’s reputation, increasing revenue, maintaining organized records, promoting their community, and more.
What are our hypothetical competitors like?
What are some other platforms our users above may have tried? I reviewed 10 other musician marketplace platforms to note what features they include, their positives and negatives, as well as to derive inspiration for this app.
Common useful features I found that align with my aforementioned user and business needs are:
✅ # of verified previous bookings
✅ artist location
✅ reviews with 1-5 star ratings on the search results
✅ starting prices + pricing packages
✅ availability check
✅ genres identified with
✅ languages spoken
✅ pricing packages
✅ # of years active
✅ whether they’re a band or just one artist, if band then names of members
How might we fulfill these user needs and goals with design?
Our user goals:
To know what the artist sounds like live ➡️
To know the artist’s overall branding ➡️
To know how an artist charges ➡️
To know the artist’s behavior when performing ➡️
More consolidated, less scattered info on artist across multiple disparate sources ➡️
A search engine that organizes artists by factors users often look for such as genre and location ➡️
✨
Possible design opportunities:
Sections for artist audio and/or video
Profile should feature multiple photos
A section that lists multiple pricing options
Social proof, like a section for reviews from other users
A detailed profile section that includes years of experience, genre, and more
Search results inspired by Google search results that tag artist rating, genre, and other key highlights
2024 revision: Incorporating generative AI
To leverage the power of generative AI to assist with this project, I asked ChatGPT to pose as an extra user. To account for the biases mentioned above, I specifically chose an older persona who was not well-represented in my research.
The prompt was:
“Now imagine that you're a 50-year-old COO of a major tech corporation. The company is putting on its own 3-day conference that'll have employees flying in from several states. You're looking for 2 rock bands local to the area of the conference to perform at the outdoor dining area during lunchtime and dinnertime. More specifically, you're looking for cover bands who can play rock covers of popular hit songs from the 1990s and early 2000s. You're looking to turn your conference's mealtimes into nostalgic dance parties. The band members should be warm, friendly, and entertain the audience members who are mostly eating. It's important they keep the performances lighthearted without making controversial statements. Once you identify the bands, you'll be handing the coordination to an event coordinator. What will you expect an app to find and book such musicians to deliver? What would make such an app easy to use?”
The mockups below incorporate some of ChatGPT’s feedback 👇
User journey overview: searching for an artist, then contacting them
While a successful performance depends on several factors, for this project I decided to focus on the user journey of identifying the right artist and the initial outreach.
Note: Though only a mobile version has been designed, I acknowledge this app is meant to be used on desktops as well.
Hypothetical KPIs
To measure the success of this product, I would look at:
amount of user signups
amount of musicians contacted per user
amount of musicians booked by user
search completion time
how often users refine their searches
most and least-used filters and types of search terms (genre, style, community, sound, mood, etc)
amount and content of booking error/support tickets
user reviews, especially feature complaints and requests
referral rate
average booking value
the percentage of new users who successfully complete a booking within a specific time frame
🏆 Hypothetical wins would look like:
users reducing the overall time they spend finding the right musician, as well as reducing the time spent in the overall cycle of hiring and completing the payment
users praising in the reviews “this made it so much easier to find the right person who align with my organization’s values!”
users acknowledging and praising redesigns that improved their user experience in any way such as “I’m glad they added a feature for showing other venues the artist has performed at!”
an increasing growth in the percentage of artists booked per user or completion of the booking cycle/decrease in user abandonment
artists gradually increasing how often other artists to join the platform
an increasing rate in user satisfaction with the band’s performance, which indicates truly finding the right fit beyond the initial search
Hypothetical future considerations
If I were to further build this product with unlimited resources, I would:
Test it on users from an even wider variety of event planning backgrounds, including professional event planners
A/B test multiple versions of the same flows and page designs
Perform further user testing on other flows beyond just finding an artist, such as setting up the performance
Interview artists who would be featured on the platform about the booking journey from their perspective
Build and test features for users to report unwanted, inappropriate behavior by artists and for artists to report such user behavior as well
Figure out ways to further refine search accuracy for users to further reach the objective stated above of finding the right artist
Test it for the KPIs mentioned above
…and much more!