Me and some of the UX designers who participated to the project have been interviewed by the team at Adobe to talk about our experience.

Check out their article on Medium !

What is a real-life inspired project?

In April-May 2022, I participated to a unique project with Adobe, to help UX/UI designers improve their skills by practicing with a real client, RCA records (an american record label), on a fictional project.

We worked on this project together with the Adobe team and designers from all around the world, all our meetings (including stakeholder meetings) happened remotely.

How does this work?

Each meeting focused on different steps of the design process and we all had deliverables to work on in between each meeting. We individually worked on each deliverable, and got to share them on Discord to get feedback from Adobe mentors and peers.

What was the goal of this project?

The goal was to build a website for an up-and-coming artist named Echo (a fictional artist) for our client RCA records.

My role

UX/UI design intern.

My role was to conduct a competitive analysis, create a full prototype for the website, conduct usability tests and implement the necessary iterations.

Due to the nature of the project, I also benefited from the insights of my teammates who also worked on the same deliverables on their side.

The Problem

Echo, an up-and-coming artist, is releasing her first album with RCA Records in a few months. RCA Records and Echo need a platform to promote the album, sell concert tickets and merchandise and share various pieces of content about the artist with fans.

The main takeaways were:

  • The most important call to action on the Homepage should be pre-saving the new single.

    Pre-saving helps increase the number of streams across platforms on the day of release, the songs can then feature on algorithmic playlists and rank higher on billboard charts (it is the same concept as pre-ordering a book).

  • We want fans to stay on the website and avoid an in-and-out experience (which is usually the case on artists’ websites).

  • We need to create a connection between the artist and her fans.

First meeting with our client

An overview of competitors’ websites

Our research began with a competitive analysis.
I chose to analyse the websites of Willow Smith, Katy Perry and Tate Mc Rae. I chose these websites as they are 3 young women with a strong style like Echo, so I wanted to see how the personality, style and story of these singers were shown on their website and also what type of content was on these sites.

I don’t usually visit artists’ websites, so this step was essential for me and extremely informative.

My main findings were:

  • Pre-saving or downloading a new album/song is usually the main CTA on artist’s websites

  • The architecture of the websites is similar:
    -The use of anchor links is very common
    -The main destinations are Music, Videos, Tour and Merch

  • Artists don’t have much information about who they are and don’t share their story on their website

  • A newsletter is a feature used on Katy Perry’s website to build a connection with fans

See the full competitive analysis here.

👍🏼 OPPORTUNITIES

  • Creating a way to connect with the artist (newsletter, text message)

  • Creating a page with story/information about the artist

  • Sharing the artist’s personality/style through the visual design

Due to the tight deadline, we chose to use the competitive analysis and information gathered during the stakeholder meeting as the main element. of our primary research.

If we had had more time, I would have conducted some user interviews too. I only got to know about the user needs and behaviours during the usability tests, having this information earlier on would have been helpful and would have saved time later on.

During the following meeting, we presented the results of our research to our client and set up some clear goals, and agreed on the solutions we wanted to implement.

🎯 BUSINESS GOALS

  • Encouraging users to pre-save the album and new single

  • Creating a connection between Echo and her fans

  • Share the artist’s story

Synthesising research findings and generating ideas with our clients

Creating a proto-persona with our client

I created a proto-persona based on the information that our client gave us to ensure everyone in the team is on the same page, build solutions with the same user in mind, and agree on their goals, needs, and pain points.

Ideation

  • Agreeing on the website’s architecture

The competitive analysis showed us that artists’ websites all have a similar architecture.

We settled on the same type of architecture to ensure music fans would immediately know how to navigate the website.

Sketches and mid-fidelity wireframes

A closer look at my original high-fidelity design solutions

  • Home page:

Please note that each designer worked on their own prototype for this project, this design is therefore entirely created by me. We were only given photos of Echo and her albums, the Echo logo and a colour palette.

  • Echo Lounge:

( The screen below is at the end of the main page and not on the Echo Lounge page)

I conducted 4 usability tests and 3 people said this. The issue was quite clear, most users don’t know what pre-saving is.

However, after explaining what it was, they said weren’t very interested in the feature...

I shared my finding with my teammates, they had similar findings: participants either didn’t know about pre-saving or didn’t see the point in pre-saving.

A very insightful round of usability tests

All participants located the Echo Lounge because I asked them to look for information about the artist. (Retrospectively, I don’t think I should have presented this task the way I did).

Participants said they hadn’t seen the feature before I mentioned it, they were however very enthusiastic to discover more about the artist, 3 of them asked me if I was going to add more content on the page.

See more about the usability test here.

😬 CHALLENGES

  • Finding a way to explain pre-saving to the users

  • Designing features that reinforce the connection between artist and fans

  • Highlighting the Echo Lounge feature on the Home page

  • Creating an incentive that gives users an immediate reward when pre-saving
    so that they are encouraged to pre-save.

Final solutions

  • Home Page:

  • Echo Lounge:

📖 WHAT I LEARNED

I am able to commit to a side project.
When I worked on this project, I was still a student. I didn’t know if I was going to have the energy and motivation to commit, knowing that I had a lot of studying to do. I am very proud of the way I organised my time and pushed myself to work on this project.

If I do not know about a feature, many users will probably be in the same situation.
It may sound silly but when I first found out about pre-saving, I assumed that it was a well-known feature that I didn’t know about. I then designed the feature without introducing users to it because of this assumption, which led to the feature being ignored entirely. I will not be making this mistake again!

I can feel like part of a team even through a Discord chat.
What I loved about this project is that I truly felt like I was part of a team. We continuously helped each other and gave feedback or advice to each other. I felt so encouraged and supported even though we’ve never met. Working in a team helped me progress so much

Asking for feedback will help me progress faster.
I love talking about design and how to solve problems so I tend to ask for feedback regularly because I want my design to be great. There is a ton of things that I don’t know yet, and asking for feedback is what helps me achieve my goal.
Having the opportunity to talk to peers and mentors daily was incredibly helpful and I have learned and progressed so much.

“Noemie is a very thoughtful and supportive teammate. We were also impressed by her communication style and her designs. The presentation of her design solutions was excellent, she came across as confident and trustworthy”

Elize Todd, Product Design Lead and Adobe instructor