Centered in NYC, Columbia University strives to provide students with chances to change the community. For my Human-Centered Design course, we were assigned with the design challenge of creating a product that enhances a typical New Yorker's life. For this project, I and 3 teammates created a product that relives the worry in finding a suitable place to practice for emerging musicians.
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Design a product for musicians to find practice spaces around NYC at affordable rates.
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Take advantage of the unused spaces around the city (office buildings, empty apartment space, etc.)
The Solution
How might we help emerging musicians in New York City find accessible and affordable places to practice their music?
The Problem Statement
Project Overview
Product Designer
Visual Designer
Role
10 Weeks
Feb. - Apr. 2023
Time
Figma
iMovie
Tools
The Human-Centered Design Process
Testing
Prototype
Ideate
Empathize
Context & Research
• Context
& Research
In the Human-Centered Design course at Columbia University we were placed into teams of 4 to participate in a design challenge: to create a product that makes working New Yorkers' lives better. This challenge is a very broad starting point, so we picked a territory we were all interested in making an impact in: music.
But, even the music territory is a pretty broad place to start, so we decided to do some research into the NYC generally, and the music sphere of NYC to figure out a clearer direction for our problem statement.
Unused Building Space
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The pandemic has reduced demand for offices, so cities have been left with vacant space that could be converted to other uses.
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At-home life resulted in more multipurpose spaces like rooftop decks, workout spaces in garages, etc. that are now being unused as we return to in-person activities.
Musicians in NYC
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The music industry is so culturally vibrant, since NYC is home to so many different ethnicities.
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Before the pandemic, people frequented concerts & music festivals as a way to support local artists.
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After pandemic, live-streaming & virtual music services give reasons for listeners to enjoy music virtually without leaving home.
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Even before the pandemic, musicians struggled to make money. Just performing isn't enough to make a living - many musicians have to take on side jobs
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There can be huge losses from holding live concerts - especially as more virtual options emerge after the pandemic.
Cost of Living
• Ideation
Now that we had the problem statement, we took to the drawing board. We sat together and brainstormed not only products but possible experiences that would help musicians efficiently find practice spaces.
Most of the worries that musicians had wasn't really around the practicing itself, but more of finding a suitable place to practice. There were convenient options around, but came at the price of inflexible practice hours, cost, distance, or the locations themselves didn't give the motivation to practice.
How might we help emerging musicians in New York City find accessible and affordable places to practice their music?
This is where we found the common problem that we needed to solve:
• Prototype
At its core, NoteSpace is an experience. So, the prototype for NoteSpace contains two parts - the user experience flow for musicians and space renters, and the online platform.
The Musician Airbnb Concept was the most popular and we gained a lot of insights as to why. The main reason was that, although some of our ideas were said as creative, the Airbnb model is one that's familiar. There's not much of a learning curve to use it, so its faster for musicians to just book with a system they know, rather than go through the hassle to learn a completely new experience.
Other reasons included:
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Variety of Ambient Spaces - it wasn't just one box or just panels put up. If musicians needed a change in location they could do so with ease.
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Values in playing in a place where they won't be disturbed or distracted - the listings on our idea would be such that hosts wouldn't be in the place at the time.
We consolidated these ideas to our top 3, and took them back to our 9 participants to see what they thought of the potential ideas. We also asked them to order them by which solutions they would most likely use.
#1: Airbnb + Uber Music Experience
#2: Portable Soundproof Panels
#3: Portable, Traveling Practice Space
• User Testing
Key Finding #1
"I want to see the space before I go practice there"
Just as with the original AirBnB, users value being able to see pictures of the space. For musicians in particular, they need to know how much space they have for their booking, because some instruments are large or take a lot of space to play. Additionally, knowing where a space is and how it's structured helps a musician determine if acoustics will be ok for a good practice environment.
Key Finding #2
"How far is the space?"
If the practice spaces are all far away from a musician's location, they're less likely to take the time to move there - especially those with large instruments. To solve this, we added 2 features:
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Distance indicators for each space, so users know what the closest space was to them.
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Transportation add-on: for each booking, we give musicians the option to request for transport help, so they don't have to struggle to get themselves and their instrument to their practice destination.
Key Finding #3
"Is what I'm paying for worth it for the space I'm practicing in?"
Unlike vacations, practicing is a short-term engagement. Our users requested that rather than flat rates for a location, that we provide hourly rates. That way, they can plan their practice sessions in blocks and they know what they're paying.
So, we changed our charge to give only hourly rates, and gave musicans the option to pick the timings they would need the space. So, they only pay for the time they need, rather than the whole day.
After designing the experience & platform prototypes, we brought this back to our musician users for their feedback, before making final tweaks to the visual design.
Here are some key findings we had from the user feedback.
Part 1: The User Experience
To give users a familiar experience, we modeled the NoteSpace experience after Airbnb's host & guest format. Businesses, apartment tenants and official studios can host their spaces on the NoteSpace platform while musicians can rent the spaces for the intervals needed to practice.
Part 2: The Online Platform
The NoteSpace Platform was largely based on Airbnb's design though it's specifically tailored to musicians. Users can filter by their ideal practice space conditions, view available rooms, and add optional transportation if they have large instruments.
Concept/Lo-Fi Sketches
Browse Locations Mid-Fi
Confirm Payment Mid-Fi
• Final Design
The final design of NoteSpace is, at its core, an experience helps musicians in 3 main areas
The web platform was designed on Figma and the concept video on iMovie. For our final deliverable, we presented our concept development case, which can be found at this link.
Product Concept Video
Interactive Figma Prototype
Reflections
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Brainstorming is, in itself, an iterative process. The first idea isn't going to be the best one. By constantly coming up with ideas (or adaptations to old ideas) and bringing them to users, your team's knowledge base on the problem increases. This allows the team to come up with even better ideas.
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User feedback is wide-arching, and so can be the solution. This was my first time going all-in on user research. What I learned was that even in a niche market like emerging musicians, everyone has different needs and wants. So, creating a product that intersects the most urgent the pain points is incredibly dependent on that user feedback.
My Takeaways
My team and I all had backgrounds in music. We knew that a lot of practice goes into making a performance perfect. Through this experience we gained a lot of insights into the more pain points that emerging musicians have in their careers outside of performances, especially in NYC.
For this project, user research and feedback took center stage. We strived to create a product that was intuitive and worry-free for users, rather than push forward with an out-of-the-box idea. Taking inspiration from existing products and putting our own twist on them was a great exercise in redesigning features for new user-bases.
After doing some secondary research into the NYC and its music industry, we recruited 9 participants consisting of 7 musicians and 2 concert-goers to learn about their lifestyles in music and find the root of problems that they were facing.
The main things we wanted to know from our participants were:
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Experience in music & performing
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Day-to-day life (including living & financial situations, practicing, performance schedule, etc.)
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Motivations for pursuing music as a career or going to concerts
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Struggles and rough spots in their profession
After interviews, we summarized our findings into 2 main personas.
• Empathize
Enabling worry-free practicing for emerging musicians
NoteSpace
