Hire Notes, the Musician’s Lifestyle Toolbox

UX Research | Product Design | Interactive Dashboard Redesign | Branding Pivot | Responsive Website

Overview

Hire Notes is a Musician’s booking platform designed to simplify performances and facilitate payments on-time. The company wanted to develop a deeper understanding of their existing and potential client needs and challenges, striding to diversify their offerings to a broader audience with sharpened capabilities that are approachable and easy to navigate.

Project duration & team

Three week design sprint collaborating with two UX/UI Design colleagues

Tools

Heavy whiteboarding, sketch pad & pencil, sticky notes galore, SketchApp, InVision, Photoshop, and Keynote

My Primary Functions

Methodology

Usability Testing, Stakeholder Interviews, Business Model Canvas, User Research, Survey Construction, Existing & Potential Client Interviews, Contextual Inquiry, Affinity Mapping, Persona Development, Competitive & Comparative Research, Data Analysis & Synthesis, Wireframing, Iterative Design, Prototyping, UI & Visual Design.

Problem:

"How might we help musicians be more successful in their professional endeavors by assisting their organization, growth, and management of the many moving pieces in their hectic careers?"

Utilize quick efficient tools & streamline the many moving pieces in your musical career.

Eliminate the hassle of stressing over details so you can focus on growing your craft. Unlock your greatest potential & take your career to the next level. — Eliminate the hassle of stressing over details so you can focus on growing your craft. Unlock your greatest potential & take your career to the next level.

Create performances, manage payments & contracts, send messages, coordinate with other musicians, tackle to-do-lists, and a whole lot more! — Create performances, manage payments & contracts, send messages, coordinate with other musicians, tackle to-do-lists, and a whole lot more!

Solution: Bringing it all together

Through the process of conducting thorough & thoughtful empathetic research via multiple channels and perspectives, we were able discover the core UX/UI issues to solve with our designs to exceed Hire Notes’ business goals and complex user needs in unison. Painstakingly analyzing and synthesizing the data gathered, my team constructed a comprehensive, interactive, intuitive, approachable, highly effective, and streamlined digital dashboard for musicians to launch their careers to the next level without getting bogged down struggling to juggle the countless moving pieces that often held them back.

The redesigned dashboard and remapped performance creation sequence unleash a diversified toolbox with reinforced functionalities to assist musicians in tackling performance career endeavors without juggling minutiae - sit back and jam, let the data analytics & metrics do the talking.

ORGANIZE. GROW. MANAGE.

APPLICABLE TO ALL GENRES AND PERFORMANCE STYLES

Incendiary Research: Igniting the torch to discovery

Blessed with the conundrum of seemingly endless design possibilities and fearing the impending doom of falling upon the twisted corkscrew of an enormous UX-Swiss Army Knife, my team struggled momentarily in the early stages to discover a balance of alignment & realistic scoping with Hire Notes' enthusiastic CEO given our short runway to deliver.

Conducting a thorough business model canvas with our lead stakeholder delivered the dynamic calibration needed to put us on the same page with where the site was currently, where it needed to be heading immediately, and primary milestones for the distant future that clearly constrained the direction we needed to dive headfirst into with research.

After completing extensive interviews of existing and potential users in addition to strapping numerous observed user sessions under our belt, we stared at an overflowing plate of succulent research findings to hungrily digest. Chomping directly into rigorously meaty affinity mapping sessions, we began to extrapolate insights and identify key observation patterns that lead us to develop diverse personas representing the complex archetypes of current and potential users.

Merging insights from our primary research, competitive & comparative analysis, explorative usability testing & contextual inquiries of the existing platform, my team honed in tightly on current & future user needs, challenges, and obstructive pain points, directly sculpting our recommended feature prioritization and design implementations.

Early sketches:

Making a dent: Results, reflections & impact

The product of implementing our research insights within all of our design decisions led us to deliver a polished product that effectively aligned our client’s business goals with the intricate user needs of performing musicians. Our redesign expanded and evolved the Hire Notes platform features and functionality from previously only serving classically trained musicians seeking to facilitate online payments to now be a flexible and customizable resource for any kind of performing artist to not only streamline payments for any revenue model but also expand their networks, build their careers, and bring order to the many chaotic facets that complicate their professional endeavors.