Project: Ideating a new artist product for DICE, a global event discovery and ticketing platform
Year: 2022
Role: Senior Product Designer
I was hired to ideate and design DICE’s first ever product for artists. At the point of joining, the company worked with fans (B2C) and venues or promoters (B2B) but wanted to expand it’s remit by building a product that would add value to artist and their teams (management and agents).
I worked on this project on my own during my first 6 months at DICE, relying solely on weekly catch ups with the product director and lots of consulting with my wonderful stakeholders from DICE’s artist development team, until in Q2 2023 I joined a CFX squad dedicated to building the product.
I started out by leading some research to help clarify the shared goals among DICE’s stakeholders for this project, as well as the real user needs for artist teams.
Challenge:
This project was the “cool kid in town” so every stakeholder wanted to be involved and there were very disjointed visions for what this would look like.
I had started interviewing a few of them to learn more, but it quickly became too much to keep track of.
My bet:
I've decided to get them all together and run an assumptions workshop to map out our collective assumptions and prioritise questions for research.
This way I was primed to learn whether our stakeholders were considering real user problems.
Assumption mapping workshop board
Notion board to track research progress
User interviews
Once I knew which questions to ask, it was time to interview some users. I wrote a research plan and conducted the interviews myself as there wasn't a research team at DICE.
Running User Interviews on Lookback
Using empathy mapping to create personas
Challenge:
The initial idea was to then validate these findings at larger scale through quantitative research – using Typeform, the responses CSV was meant to produce a graph that would highlight the biggest opportunities which were currently unsatisfied. Leadership blocked this effort out of concerns for confidentiality.
My bet:
I partnered with the Artist Development team to select a focus group of reputable artist managers and agents that DICE had close relationships with and could trust sharing these product ideas with. Given they would be the product’s pilot users too, we took a bet on focusing on their specific needs.
Selected focus group
Grouping insights by theme
5 main insights themes: artist managers / agents want to...
Help their artists’ career: make it long lasting and sustainable, give them the tours they want and help them stay true to themselves
Looking after their team & their well being: keep them supported and improving, enable them to problem solve and be mindful of their mental health
Handle the workload: prioritise efficiently, stay on top of things.
Be innovative: be open to esoteric conversations, be creative and thoughtful with their work.
Data to support decisions: Access to all insights that will help with marketing, more granular data to help with touring and venue picking
Insights report that was distributed to stakeholders to present research findings
Sitting on so much rich insight from both stakeholders and users, it was time to put together a conceptual prototype for what the tool in it’s glory could look like.
At this stage the Artist Development team had hired a dedicated Data Analyst to help us gather real data on each one of our pilot users.
So we went back to our focus group with both a data dashboard and a product concept prototype, to see
1) which concrete information was valuable to them 2) which product ideas excited them.
The reception overall was quite good, so I finally had something a bit more tangible as a goal to work towards.
5 things our pilot users were excited about:
Co-relation between streams and ticket sales
Being able to communicate with fans and target super fans
Tour general view sell through rate in a tooltip
Waiting list data
With the north star defined, it became clear our first goal would be to build an artist login to start onboarding our pilot artist users.
The “north star” – I put together an opportunity framework to keep concrete objectives in mind.
Figma screenshot - full MVP journey
I worked on defining this MVP journey and put together the interactive presentation below
to be able to show to our Ops teams how it’d work.
Initially the tool would require a lot of involvement from them - since, so that we could learn fast, we were starting light on the product side until we validated the need for this tool.
Interactive walkthrough presentation inspired by growth.design
Challenge:
Whilst all this was happening, DICE's leadership started to want seeing some revenue coming in. At this point as a cross functional team we asked ourselves “how can we make this happen?”
Our approach:
We realised that Merch was a project that could happen in parallel. Now as a super squad (there were over 30 of us in it at some point) we ideated ways of making that possible without having the backend or even existing artist accounts ready.
After a few workshops and more research (e.g. on whether we could integrate with shopify) we decided the quickest way to implement this would be to include admin functionality to add and manage stock in our existing B2B tool for venues and promoters (a tool called MIO).
MIO adjustments for merch
I worked very closely with a peer in the fan design team (we split that way internally), to design the new experience for both fans and internal team.
And made a few beta tests internally with some events at the office, to test that both product and ops were ready to take it on.
Challenges:
Refocusing to short-term profitability led to a reprioritisation. Dice for Artists still hasn't been released.
Decision making was slow given how involved the C suite was with both the DICE for Artists project and the Artist Merch initiative.
Operation teams were heavily involved with any of the Merch work and we had to consider the unique ways in which different artists sell and manage their stock.
Restructuring meant different leaders took responsibility for the project. This kept expanding the stakeholders I had to manage and keep aligned on a single vision.
Positives:
My detailed prototype was used to successfully advocate for investing in developing the DICE for Artists product.
The most impactful User Research of my career took place with incredibly senior figures within the Music Industry. I had to both represent the DICE brand and gain incredibly valuable user insights - which substantially impacted the product direction.
The Merch product was launched and in it’s beta release DICE was already seeing 4x conversion to buying merch via the app vs a standard merch stand.