RCREATOR
Lead Designer
I designed the MVP for RCreator - a web application for musicians to discover, participate, and host remix contests.
Team
2 Front End Developers
2 Back End Developers
1 Product Designer (me)
My Role
UX Design
UI Design
User Research
Duration
12 Weeks
Problem Statement
Aspiring hip hop / electronic music producers need a way to showcase their talent to established players in the music industry.
Stakeholder Interview
To kick off the project, I sat down with RCreator founder Jeremy Ma. I tried to pick his brain around two key areas: business goals and technical constraints. Here were my takeaways:
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🤔 Problems and Solutions at this stage of the project
Potential User Interviews
I conducted seven interviews, six of which participated in past remix contests, one of which hosted a remix contest. Findings were distilled into provisional personas and storyboards in the next design phase.
Questions asked included:
- What are some of the problems you face as an aspiring music producer?
- What are your music goals in the next year? In the next 5 years?
- What remix platforms have you used in the past? What did you like / dislike about the experience?
🤔 Problems and Solutions at this stage of the project
Competitive Analysis
I analyzed existing remix apps on the market, read through reviews, and captured screens of key user flows.
Provisional Persona
I created a provisional persona (Adam Howard) based on qualitative data collected from interviews in the previous stage. Every design decision I made throughout the project was to move Adam closer towards his ultimate goal - to get recognition as an artist.
Storyboards
To help narrate who Adam was and what problem we were helping him solve, I created a storyboard.
Redefining Project Goals
To help clarify my research findings, I combined Adam's goal with RCreator's business goals and technical constraints into this diagram:
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I also sat down with the RCreator team to re-define our project goals. Here were our conclusions:
- Design a fun, interactive platform for Adam to discover and participate in remix contests.
- Design an effective system for hosts to quickly and easily create contests, define awards, and select winners.
- Design community aspects of the app for Adam to connect with other creators - from user profiles, to group profiles, to community events.
- Create a playful UI aesthetic that appeals to creatives.
User Flows
User flows were created to clarify how Adam would accomplish key goals within the app.
Lo-fi Wireframes
Low fidelity wireframes were sketched based on user flows defined in the previous step.
Hi-fi Wireframes
Once I established the structure of each screen, hi fidelity mockups were designed.
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🤔 Problems and Solution
Problem - When I was nearing the completion of the hi-fidelity design stage, our team realized there were still a number of essential (but not initially obvious) user tasks not woven into the app:
- What if a user wanted to delete their account?
- What if a user wanted to request personal data we stored of them?
- What if a user wanted to save and go back to a contest they were still creating?
Solution - I eventually had our team write down every essential user task still undefined. My solution (although not elegant) was to rework (or create) various screens to accommodate these new set of tasks. This was a major lesson for me to define every possible user task earlier in the project and create more detailed lo-fidelity wireframes. This would have saved our team many hours of work.
🤔 Problems and Solutions at this stage of the project
Usability Testing
Through userinterviews.com, I recruited 5 users that resembled our target persona - all were passionate musicians looking to make a name for themselves in an ultra competitive industry. Participants were asked to complete a series of tasks:
- Sign up for a contest
- Set up your own contest
- Join community groups
A common problem was shared by all participants - they didn't fully understand the purpose of RCreator when first landing on the homepage. One user thought it was an online community for musicians, one assumed it was a music blog, another thought it was an artist's database. Creating a persuasive, information-rich homepage quickly became a high priority task in the next phase.
Interation
Before
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After
Lessons Learned
The biggest lesson I learned during this project was the importance of user feedback. The information I received during our usability testing was invaluable, which I couldn't have received anywhere else. If I could take a time machine back to the start of the project, I would have sought this feedback earlier (and more often), ideally after the first lo-fi mockups were sketched. Various assumptions our team made would have been validated before diving into the time-intensive hi-fi mockup phase.
Final Interactive Prototype
Click the image to open the prototype in a new tab.
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YCombinator
After 12 weeks of hard work, the RCreator team applied for YCombinator and actually got invited for an interview. They were impressed with our work, but ultimately passed as the problem we were trying to solve wasn't big enough. Here is the email they sent us (click image to expand):
