OVERVIEW
The Oakland Symphony builds upon a rich history of more than 80 years of classical music in the East Bay. Their current website allows visitors to buy tickets to shows, learn about the symphony’s history, plan their visit, and help support the arts.
TEAM & DURATION
2 UX Designers: Mattias Rosenberg and Myself
2 Week Sprint - January 2019
Challenge
The Symphony is well attended, but they want to reach a younger generation.
This concept project focused on a two pieces:
Designing to engage a younger demographic
Designing to increase the usability around searching for concerts
Current Website
SOLUTION
Make the events easily accessible and showcase theM as an experience to be shared with their friends and family
The redesign of the website allowed online visitors easily find, save, and share events.
We applied the following changes:
Moved events to the home page for easy access
Introduced a experience-based filtering feature
Introduced a share feature for the events
Introduced a bookmark feature to allow users to save and return
Added a sticky bottom bar to the product page to allow for quick access to important information
The Process
We began our research phase with the following objective: understand how young people living in the bay area interact with live concerts.
We surveyed 27 people and interviewed 7, all in the Bay Area and aged between 20 - 40, to find out their relationship with live concerts. Our insights:
Young bay area residents typically don’t have any strong inclination or aversion towards classical music
Those who said they hadn’t really thought about going to the symphony, said their friends or family going would influence their decision
>70% said they usually hear about events from people they know
Many said they used their mobile phones almost exclusively
Key Insight: Young millennials are looking to concerts as a way to create new experiences with and connect with loved ones.
Defining our solution
To synthesize the insights into a solution, we needed to address three things
Make the concerts a social experience to be shared with loved ones
Retain the Oakland Symphony’s unique and memorable programs and image
Make the concerts easy to find and accessible
Paper prototype
We tested our paper prototype with 5 users in our target audience and received some of the below valuable feedback to extend into our next iteration:
The filters seemed intuitive for most users
Users wanted to see how many seats are remaining before checking out
The “Buy Tickets” call to action on the product page was too much of a commitment at this stage, the user wasn’t sure when or if they would be able to select seats first
iPhone vs Android share icon was generally understood, but users did point it out as not their native icon
Iteration 1 - Low fidelity Wireframe
Incorporating the feedback, we created low fidelity wireframes to better test interactions and display our design decisions.
We conducted 4 usability tests with theses wireframes and our insights were:
4/4 users were able to navigate, filter, share, and go through the event browsing process to the seat selection button
Make the share and save features more prominent
Iteration 2 - High Fidelity Wireframes
In our final iteration for the sprint, we took in the feedback received and made a few tweaks as well as increased the fidelity while still retaining the imagery from the actual website.
RESULTS & REFLECTIONS
Positive reception in testing but still a way to go
Throughout testing, we received a positive reception to the design, specifically the custom experience filters. These filters seemed to be intuitive for most users and the share function was well liked. However, there’s still a need to continue to test the current design as well as explore how the share functionality would work with the user’s native phone. However, based on our research, we are confident that this solution will help showcase the Oakland Symphony programs in a way that appeals to the younger generation.