Orchestrate
Designing a community for community bands
Orchestrate is a website concept I am working on as part of my master's program. The aim of Orchestrate is to create an online community for amateur musicians. Here, interested musicians can find bands to join or instruments to rent or buy, band members can stay updated on band events and conversations, band administrators can manage their bands and access resources such as funding opportunities and pieces for their next concert, and curious music-lovers can learn about community bands, find a concert near them, or even donate.
My main goal in completing this project is to gain a deeper understanding of the information architecture design process in digital products, including the research process, sitemap development, wireframing, and user evaluations. This project is still an active work in progress - check back in later to see the finished product!
Domain Research - I started out by interviewing three domain experts to understand more about the topic. These three people had several years of music experience and had experience with at least two bands. They had also all joined a band within the previous six months. These interviews were semi-structured - my goal was to gain a clear understanding of the domain and their experiences with community bands, but I also wanted to appreciate the unique angle each of my interviewees had to offer by keeping the interview conversational. Once I had gathered my interview notes, I created a domain model to help me visualize the main concepts involved and how they related to one another. This diagram would serve as a foundation for my sitemap.
Mapping the website - I created a sitemap for the website concept to better visualize the content, how it should be structured, and how users would navigate it. I first conducted a card sort using key domain concepts that would be included in the site with approximately 7 participants from my target audience. Using the insights from that test, I built out the sitemap, then ran a tree test with 12 participants to ensure that the structure was logical and key information was findable.
Visualizing the user's experience - Referencing the sitemap, I created a user journey to show the various paths a user could take to join a community band via my website. This serves to demonstrate the flexibility of my site's information structure, empathize with the user, and check for any opportunities to simplify the information-finding process.
More wireframes & user evaluations coming soon.
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