The first stages of our project, after solidifying our user group, was conducting user interviews and completing a competitive analysis of relevant products for our user group.  

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About: User Interviews

As a team, we collected a total of five user interviews. The interviews were semi-structured with additional questions added based on previous answers and time constraints. The questions of our interviews centered on the interviewee’s identity as a musician, pain points during the process of creating their music, the collaboration aspect of making music, and the users music-centered desires. 

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Interview Takeaways

The main takeaways that we learned from our user interviews was that there was a strong desire to feel a part of the music community and collaboratively create music. When asked about gaps in their music creative process, one of our users even said, “... I wish I had more people to work with… it would be nice to have an easier way to be in a musical community” (Sam’s user interview).

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A few other pain points we discovered in our interviews were:

• Creating polished and consistent recordings

• Spending all your time doing tedious managerial work

• The physical labor of doing shows without any help

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While, the above pain points were very noteworthy, they weren’t universal among all of our interviews. Collaboration was the only topic that all of our interviews felt they lacked in.

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Overall, these interviews solidified the fact that a big deficit in the music community is finding musicians to collaborate with and being able to collaborate with those people online. Therefore, we decided that our final product would target this pain point.

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About: Competitive Analysis

In addition to our user interviews, the other half of our research consisted of completing four competitive analyses on products that target our same user group. The products that we analyzed were SoundCloud, YouTube, Spotify, and Kompoz. All of these products are platforms that allow musicians to share and discover new music. Kompoz has an additional layer that allows musicians to collaboratively create music, however it only allows users to share recording files, not collaborate live.

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Competitive Analysis Takeaways

These competitive analyses combined with the user interviews taught us that while amateur musicians have access to many sharing sites, for some reason these sites aren’t helping them feel connected to their music community. Therefore, we decided that the top goal of our site would be to help our users feel connected to their online music community.