DEVELOPING A PLATFORM TO HELP MUSICIANS PUBLISH AND PROMOTE THEIR ART

OVERVIEW

PledgeMusic is a music-centric form of Kickstarter, helping bands not only raise money for projects, but offering a network of recording and distribution teams to help execute the projects once funded. The site has a broad network within the United States and the United Kingdom of producers, promoters, recording studios, tour managers, agents and PR teams.

SITE BEFORE REDESIGN

The site had been successful, but was in need of visual and functional improvements to keep bands and fans excited and interacting more easily. It needed a stronger information hierarchy to allow better scanning of the page. Also, as a music site, it felt too sterile with beige and white as the dominant colors. The redesign would also elevate the artist content wherever possible, as it is why fans are here.

WIREFRAMES

I started by working with the CEO and CTO to draw out the key pages that would be realigned to support the user journey. More than just realigning and cleaning up the page content, I wanted to elevate the pledge status’ at each interaction. The core purpose of PledgeMusic is to get these artist projects produced, so it should be apparent, this isn’t just Myspace of Spotify, even though you can consume music content similarly. The redesign had to put pledging front and center of the experience.

THE PLEDGE DESIGN SYSTEM

To bring the many types of projects to life, as well as support the different stages of a given campaign, I created a modular design system that could work for all projects, across all devices. The four campaign stages we focused on were: 1. Classic PledgeMusic Campaign, 2. Pledger-driven Campaign, 3. Pre-order Campaign, and 4. Fan Funding Campaign. Each had different motivations to promote to move the fan along to support the artist. Each of the messaging options would appear dynamically for users, to find which message moved them down the donation funnel.

LIQUID NAVIGATION

To work on all device sizes, I designed the main nav to function as a scalable container, with rules as to how to stack or minimize as the screen size degraged.

FULL PAGE UI DESIGN

After the wireframes and campaign bars were signed off, I began full page redesigns for the site using the new brand colors, fonts, and goal of leading with artist-made content. This entire process was streamlined by myself and the CTO who did the dev work for the site remotely.