Thesis Project 06: Concept Rationales

Narrow down to one concept by analyzing the pros and cons of each idea using the experience principles defined as the criteria.

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 will feel less sense of achievement.

2. Synchronous (Live) Online Gig Platform

✅Pros:

• 🎭🎉👏Engaging, with gig vibes: The live co-play means users can have more interaction with their partners or even make friends during the whole process. The live co-play experience would be very engaging as it allows and attracts audience interaction in live gigs to increase the vibe.
• 👍🎥Sharable & Memorable: Audience Interaction, Player Interaction, Gig Stage…there are a lot of elements that are meaningful to share and memorize.

❌Con:

• 👋Easy & Simple & Casual co-play process: Compared to the asynchronous co-play, expecting the practice timing and scheduling an available gig time for every group member could make the process more complicated. Also, there are more edge cases that could happen, like what if a member quit the group on purpose for some reason in the middle..?

3. The Platform Facilitating Offline Gig Experience

✅Pros:

• 👍🎥Sharable & Memorable: Offline gig experience is definitely more worth-to-share and memorable than any type of online gig.
• 🎭🎉👏Engaging, with gig vibes: Offline gig experience is very engaging, but what we need to pay attention to is that they are amateur musicians, they probably don’t have offline fans like professional musicians.

❌Con:

• 👋Easy & Simple & Casual co-play process: Compared to the online co-play, finding local amateur musicians means smaller available co-players options, and finding a local place to co-play also will make the process more complicated.

Besides,

Admittedly, in terms of technical feasibility, both these three ideas are not feasible now as the required technologies are currently not ready for the market. However, from the previous tech research, the 5G mass-coverage and the Music AI commercial availability both are expected to be achieved within 3-5 years. As an Experience Designer, it’s our mission to humanize the technology by creating meaningful experience vision for helping our users achieve their expectations.

Analysis

Each idea has its solid pro(s). Idea 2 and 3 have more pros (2) than idea 1 (1). Because the second principle — Engaging Interaction is more critical compared to the other two, and these three ideas both make the co-play process easier, simpler, and more casual than the current more professional and troublesome process.

In Conclusion,

I decided to combine idea 2 and idea 3, further streamline the co-play process, and pay more attention to the edge cases that might happen.