Marcato

Creating a professional networking website tailored for musicians so they can share work, find job opportunities, and keep up with current trends in the music industry.

Role
UX/UI Designer

Team
Individual Project

Tools
Figma, Maze
Whimsical

Responsibilities
UX/UI Design
Branding

Time Frame
4 weeks

Background

Marcato is an upcoming music business and employment-oriented online service operating through mobile app and desktop sites. The platform will be used for professional networking and career development allowing musicians to share recordings, reviews, resumes, and employers to post jobs. Users can create profiles and establish connections with one another and find job postings of various types of musical genres.

Marcato fills a need.

• Marcato lets users showcase their work in one place where people are looking for their talents.

• Marcato can create a simple experience to find work and promote opportunities.

• Marcato allows musicians to keep up with trends.

The Solution

Create a “one-stop shop”

Marcato can be a place targeted for musicians and their business - themselves. Musicians can showcase their work for potential employers. They can search for work in specific music related fields. They can get alerts for specific job opportunities. They can develop their own skills for their work.

DISCOVER

Diving deep to see what musicians do now to promote themselves and find work.

Research goals

• What platforms and methods do musicians use to find jobs?

• How do musicians promote themselves, especially potential employers?

• How do musicians engage with one another and keep up with current trends?

Findings

It’s brutal out here. If a musician wants to find work, they can’t just go on LinkedIn and write “opera singer jobs”. They have to go through their connections, opera company websites, and social media groups. And this is just to find an audition! There are so many things musicians need. To promote yourself you need an Instagram, a Facebook page, a Youtube page, a Tiktok? Also, a website, “The best musicians have their own website!” If you want to know about the latest trends, you have to follow several newsletters or scroll through Facebook past your friends trying to sell you something.

It’s a lot to learn, people don’t talk about it, and it’s hard to maintain. Musicians learn a lot on how to perfect their craft and how to work when they get the job, but they don’t learn about how to market yourself, how to network, or how to find work outside of “Hey what did you do?” A lot of the social media tools focus on the people your audience/fans, not necessarily getting word to your prospective employer. It’s a cold world out there, and it’s hard to separate the artistic journey and the business needs.

Competitive Analysis

I went through many of the products musicians could use to find jobs, network, and promote themselves. Though there many great tools, none fulfill the targeted needs in one place. When products are useful and niche, they’re informal and unorganized.

• Facebook is helpful, but it only engages fans who like the artist page, and to find work musicians have to go through groups, sort through posts, and then asks friends on their input on who posted.

• LinkedIn could be extremely helpful, but is focused on corporate or administrative work. Small gig work, music substitutes, or seasonal contract work is not something musicians can find here.

• Online job boards are sparsely updated, and usually focus on certain unions.

• Navigating different social medias and building a website is consuming and doesn’t always reach out to an audience who doesn’t know the musician.

Heuristic Analysis

The products that users go to for their various needs all have similar systems regarding inputting information and sharing it. There is an expected way to onboard to a product, navigate around the design, and access certain features. The goal would be to have these features accessible in one place, eliminating the need to go to one place for one task.

I was particularly surprised when I discovered Stagetime. I thought “Okay, my work is done, this is already a thing.” It was a product that I thought musicians needed. Networking for professional musicians. Sadly, though it was aesthetically appealing, it was not intuitive and had many accessibility issues. It only covered the “show myself” goal of my solution. It didn’t show any kind of system to find work outside of other artists putting it in their feed. It was also not accessible on mobile, at least not android, and lacked responsiveness. A few friends I had signed up, but no one is using it. I’ve learned what not to do.

Deliver

User testing

I used a maze test on the wireframes to see if users would be able to follow the flow. I had testers build their profile through the onboarding process and save a job that they search for.

• There were 17 maze testers - many of them musicians

• Testers were successful in creating their Marcato account and finding a job.

• They enjoyed the overall layouts of the screens and the concept of Marcato.

• There were issues in the portfolio creation for many of the testers.

Results analysis

• I looked through the maze results taking note where people got lost or showed confusion through the clicks that were noted.

• Most testers felt everything was intuitive, though the wireframe through some off.

  • Overall testers enjoyed the layout but wanted a more prominent feed area.

  • The onboarding was not obvious, and has inconsistencies on how to upload content

  • Searching for a job was not intuitive. Most users wanted to go through the search bar at the top, not go through the “jobs” tab to start their search.

I took testers’ comments and laid them out on an affinity map.

I then laid out the most notable patterns into an effort map to make iteration decisions.

Iterations

Based off the notes, and charting on an effort map, I focused on the following:

1) Homepage: Changing the layout of the homepage to feature the feed more. A simple fix, but I still wanted to keep the left and right columns as they will help with navigation in each part of the website.

2) Onboarding: Creating consistency in the onboarding: each section has the same way to upload media, and each section has a response for a completed action.

3) Job Search: In the final prototype, I showed that you can search through the search bar up top, since it was users most intuitive move.