FLUXX
FLUXX is a community-driven event discovery app for the underground music scene in Brooklyn. As a member actively involved in the scene, I am deeply drawn to every cultural and social aspect of it. However, COVID lockdown has deprived the scene of its usual energy and liveliness. I decided to reconnect with the community that I was drifting apart from. I empathized and recollected memories with party goers, hoping to alleviate the long-suppressed yearning for music and connections on the dance floor. My goal was to identify the most common frustrations people experience with underground parties and design a mobile app that solves those issues.
As it is a personal project, I was taking charge of the entire design process, where I encountered several obstacles. I made some incorrect assumptions and was struggling to define my core flow. Since this is not a linear process, I understood that I had to revisit and refine output of my previous steps, in order to better define my users’ problems and needs I was solving for and prioritize my features.
“It’s the sense of the freedom you get, everyone is being themselves, is there to have a good time and meet people, not just to show off. It’s about building a connection.”
Research
User interviews
I connected with 5 targeted users over virtual interviews. All of them are in their 20s and go to underground music events at least once a week. My interview discussions focused around these topics:
Party preferences on who they follow, where they go, favorite hosts/parties etc.
Discovery and planning process
Solo experiences/social interactions onsite and offsite
Activity updates with friends
Affinity Mapping
Current Behaviors
After synthesizing my findings through affinity mapping, I uncovered a list of patterns from their current behaviors:
Discover events through following tastemakers on social media and word of mouth
Make new friends and maintain connections by inviting each other to events on social media
Enjoy the freedom and spontaneity of going solo
Have different categories of friends to go to different styles of parties with
Engage with online community to share music and connect
Assumptions
Previously, I had assumed that the biggest frustration came from social situations at parties, so I asked my interviewees many questions about social interactions on-site. However, I received lots of noise in those responses. I realized that because the scene is such a safe and welcoming space, people generally enjoy meeting new people and interacting with each other without fear of judgement. On the other hand, there is very minimum smartphone usage at these parties due to no phone policy. It turned out there are fewer frustrations when it comes to social interactions through the use of technologies during parties. Undefeated, I shifted my focus away from onsite social experiences and let my initial curiosity guide me to discover 3 new key areas of pain points in event discovery, decision-making and communications.
Pain point I - Event Discovery
Problem
Social media information overload (4/5 users)
“Instagram is not central to the experience.”
“There’s too much going on on Facebook, I cannot reach the right information, it becomes hard to track what you are doing.”
Given the underground nature of these events, hosts don’t publicize things. People discover them through word of mouth or following the tastemakers on social media. These parties are already hard to discover, yet there is an ocean of irrelevant information on social media. People often find themselves lost in the discovery process.
Solution
More centralized event discovery and tracking process specific to the underground music scene
Pain point II - Decision-making
Problem
Don’t know what to expect (4/5 users)
“I would have avoided certain nights if I knew beforehand that problematic people would show up.”
“I really struggle with judging if a party is going to have a good crowd how it will turn out.”
Party-goers complained that they have hard times judging how a party will turn out, therefore they often wind up at trashy parties with bad music and nasty crowd, which can ruin their experience.
Solution
Extract and prioritize information that matters most to users in their decision making process
Pain point III - Communications
Problem
Hard to gauge friends’ commitment status (2/5 users)
“Sometimes they're just not as committed and don't buy tickets ahead of time.”
“On Facebook my friends say they going to things, but they aren’t actually going. I had to hit up another friend last minute.”
When people are committed to going an event, they want to find out whether their friends are going too. However, they find it annoying when friends who they invite to parties click “going” on Facebook but don’t actually show up.
Solution
More accurate and efficient communication to keep track of friends’s activities
Persona
I synthesized my user interview data into this persona in order to keep myself focused on the most pressing goals and needs of the most ideal users.
Competitive Analysis
A few opportunities identified after my competitive analysis are:
Knowing the right taste makers to follow is essential to discover underground music events. Therefore, bringing together a virtual community of people who are engaged in the scene to share only relevant information among each other could potentially address information overload on existing social media.
RA Guide does a good job of centralizing information for last minute decision-making, but there is not social features at all. Users still don’t know what to expect from a party other than reading the descriptions, therefore word of mouth of community insights could be leveraged. Accurate commitment status of friend circle could also help users make better decisions, which none of the current platforms is providing.
Users have also mentioned social networking apps like Grindr and Radiate where they can hit up strangers without feeling awkward and that apps that help connect people for parties should be out more.
To help solve the problems of my targeted users, my design proposal is a community-driven event discovery app that is central to underground party experience to facilitate party goers’ event discovery and decision making process .
Feature Prioritization
To solutionize the problems, I ideated some features catered to the needs of my persona and prioritized based on number of user mentions and pain points they would address.
User Flows
Site Map
Wireframes
Key screen sketches
Low-fi Wireframes
Mid-Fi Wireframes
High-Fi Wireframes
Usability Testing
I tried to be more thorough and include every possibilities for usability testing. I had extra screens and content that were not in my initial flows, which caused distraction and confusion to testers. I realized that it is more efficient to only design and test what is necessary. Testing tasks should also be focused, lengthy and wordy task assignments only made it hard for testers to remember what it was that they were supposed to accomplish.
Lessons
I learned that I can always revisit and revise my previous research and design steps. Going back a step enabled me to move forward.
Throughout the whole process, I was struggling a lot trying to account for every single frustration and ended up in a rabbit hole thinking about all the possible features and rules of my app, rather than focusing on addressing the most important needs. Thankfully, the data-driven persona was able to keep me from steering too far from my focus. Constantly referring back to research findings in the previous steps like affinity mapping also helped me recollect important insights that I had missed during my ideation process.
Next Steps
This project is still a work in progress. Though some usability testing results were reflected in my iterations and hi-fi prototype, I still have some doubts in my current designs and features. Currently, I’m still in the process of running more usability tests in order to improve my final designs.