Project date: Nov 2021 – Jan 2024
Role: UX Director, at Isadora Agency
Team: 2 Digital Producer | 1 Account Strategist | 2 Product Designers | 1 UX Researcher
Project Summary
A multi-phase project for a client who is a giant in the music industry collecting and accounting for billions of dollars globally of royalties for top artists and your favorite oldies and needed an overhaul of the current royalties portal.
Their goal was to
- Build deeper connections with artists and labels
- Ensure artists and labels were satisfied and will recommend them to others
- Enhance brand perception as the market leader
- Improve long-term platform scalability
- Reduce customer support requests
- Create a unified ecosystem with all business regions
The Challenge
The client wanted a full revamp of their portal to enhance the user experience. Their competitors have adopted modern aesthetics and advanced products and features for their portals, making it harder for them to compete. They are keen on using automated digital delivery of statements, rather than traditional physical mail, to improve efficiency and accessibility.
The demand for comprehensive and enriched data insights has increased, especially in the fields of artist acquisition and retention. These artists earn royalties from their master recordings or songwriting copyrights.
Furthermore, the company requires a unified global system that can manage various operations and tax systems across different locations.
Discovery
Discovery Workshop
Our team initiated the project by conducting a series of workshops with the client to gain an understanding of their business challenge and target audience. We came to understand how crucial it was for artist to be able to quickly and easily find their latest royalty statement and how challenging the statements are to understand.
From the workshops, we brainstormed ideas, identified any assumptions or unknowns that we had as a group, and ensured that everyone involved had a shared understanding of the project’s objectives.
Stakeholder Interviews
We further interviewed individual team members from their organization to dig into the nuances of the complexity of the business and their users learning that many of them were also former artist business managers. We also interviewed their client solutions team to learn about users and identified additional quantitative research available.
From it, we learned that the majority of their users are artists at various stages of their careers. From mega-artist actively recording and performing at concerts, to older retired artists, that are continuously earning royalties on the catalog of recordings. Additionally, there are 3rd party users such as business managers, accountants, lawyers, and labels that also support these artists in managing their accounts. All want to know how much royalties they earned with varying degrees of detail. Artists care about the overall picture while an accountant is going to want to go into the details and count every penny.
Competitor and Heuristic Review
We also conducted a competitor and heuristic review, which involved analyzing the product features and differentiators of their direct competitors in comparison to their current portal. From it, we learned that their direct competitors all had cleaner aesthetics and UI, and similar features such as displaying statements and enabling bulk downloads. One particular competitor already had a cash-advanced product that stood out as desirable to artists. Most had analytics features, that provided earnings data but did not provide insights. From this review, we knew the client had an up-hill battle, but that was not impossible to come up with a better product experience.
UX/UI Inspiration
To gain inspiration for UX/UI design and product features, we researched products and services in adjacent industries such as banking, financial, and business performance management solutions. This allowed us to evaluate their solutions for similar scenarios.
From it, we gathered ideas and interesting features that resonated with the client that we could integrate into the portal and help inform our design strategy.
The Results
As a result of our research and discovery, we presented and aligned with the client to define the following:
Vision Statement
User Personas
We established two high-level profiles, artists and 3rd party users, and a subset of personas, capturing their goals, pain points, proficiency in music royalty, and opportunities.
Problem Statements and Objective & Key Results (OKR)
| Problem | Objectives | Key Results |
|---|---|---|
| Statements are too complex and hard to draw insights from. | Improve the usability and content clarity of the statements. | Less support tickets and client complaints. |
| The current portal just delivered PDF statements and didn’t offer deeper levels of engagement. | Improve the value of the portal for users looking to get more insights in their royalty performance. | Increased engagement on statements and analytics. |
| Data and information are either too general or too detailed to be useful. | Ensure that the data presented is always clear and useful up-front, utilizing progressive disclosure to reveal more complex information gradually. | Reduced client service inquiries. Deeper engagement with positive sentiment. |
| Users wanted to be notified when new statements were available or account-related activity occurred. | Enable admins to send targeted or broad communications. | Increased portal engagement from notifications. Increased referral traffic. |
Information Architecture
Sitemap
From our review of their current portal, and to improve on the existing information architecture, we diagramed a new sitemap and a feature model to help us plan and organize the features we gathered and strategize an intuitive navigation structure.
Entity Relationship Diagram
As we continued with the project and learned more that there were data discrepancies between what is global or specific to specific countries or regions. In order to clarify it and ensure we were aligned with the business and data architecture, and we created a entity relationship diagram to depict the interconnectedness of the entities so we may have a full understanding of its influence upon the user experience and how to address it in the UI.
Next steps
Discovery is continuous, but we established a good foundation to start designing. The first section we designed is the core of the portal, the Statement and Export experience.
