For the next step, I want to further polish these wireframes a little bit and then make the wireframe prototype for usability testing.

Overview

Onboarding & Homepage

Using the personas and keeping the experience principles in my mind, I designed the first-version high-level user flow with storyboard illustrations in the key moments to indicate how users can interact with the service to achieve their co-play expectations. (Idea 3 — Facilitating offline gigs are not included in this flow, I will add it in the second-version soon)

1. Asynchronous Online Gig Platform

✅Pros:

• 👋Easy & Simple & Casual co-play process: The asynchronous gig format means players don’t need to gather together at the same time and in the same physical place for the co-play.

❌Cons:

• 🎭🎉👏Engaging, with gig vibes: The asynchronous gig format means players are not truly live co-playing with others. they don’t even need to know their partners. It’s definitely less engaging than live gigs. And it’s hard to invite the audience to participate in the asynchronous gigs, who are an essential part of increasing gig vibes.
• 👍🎥Sharable & Memorable: As the co-play experience is less engaging than the live co-play, users…

Based on the personas, the design goal, and the experience principles I listed in the previous post, I have brainstormed a couple of ideas. In general, there are three ways to facilitate the holistic co-play experience to empower amateur musicians to make friends, have fun together, and get a sense of achievement through co-play within the musical instrument community:

1. Asynchronous Online Gig Platform

What is the co-play experience?

Inspired by TikTok imitation shows and the sing together function in modern karaoke apps, in the asynchronous online gig platform:

• Before playing a piece of sheet music, user can add the recording layers shared by other players in this sheet music…

Context & Topic

For amateur musicians, having a musical instrument skill not only means you can entertain yourself alone, but also brings you into one of the world’s largest hobby communities.

As a passionate amateur piano and violin player, my thesis project started from exploring how amateur musicians find and interact with the musical instrument community.

User Research

The User Needs

The topic: Help non-musician adults with musical instrument skills better find and interact with musical instrument communities.

Overall Persona:

This week I interviewed 2 people from my target user group, and also one person who is a musical instrument learner for the comparison purpose. The goal of these exploratory interviews is to 1) Discover and prioritize target users’ motivations and needs of playing musical instruments. 2) Their high-level key activities of musical instrument playing.

Exploratory interview insights

Topic A: Build a better online musical instrument community for non-musician adults with musical instrument skills.

Problem: Help non-musician adults with musical instrument skills find and interact with musical instrument communities.

Benefit to users: Users can get a better sense of achievement, a good means of expression, make more friends, and level up their musical instrument skills.

Why? Playing musical instruments is relaxing, brings people happiness, and is a social opportunity.

Further Research

• 45.3 million non-musician adults with musical instrument skills in the U.S.

Topic B: Help elderly people better organize and manage their home storage space.

Problem: Elderly people find it hard to remember where is each item in their home.

Benefit to users: Elderly people can quickly find and organize all their items.

Why? Empower them to…

It’s very exciting to start a two-semester journey of my thesis project. I hope my thesis project can be a persuasive potential startup concept in the real world that can achieve business viability, technical feasibility(Have some core technical demos), and customer desirability. What I want to get out of this project is to think and do like an entrepreneur. What I fear most about the thesis is to make the concept to be executable in the real world, which is big enough to make it valuable and also small enough to make it feasible using limited resources. …