Baja Beach Fest — A UX Case Study
Brief: Over the last decade, music festivals have integrated technology with the experiences they provide. A music festival’s website and app functionality are critical to the overall user’s experience before, during, and after the event. The purpose of this project is to design a microsite for a music festival that is taking place in 2021.
Tools: Figma, Adobe XD, Google Forms, Otter Ai, and Miro
Time on Project: 7 Day Sprint
My Role
This is considered a solo project. My role was to conduct research surrounding music festivals, define a problem for a specific festival, and develop a solution for its users through a microsite.
Introduction
The Client
When most people think of Reggaetón music, they immediately think of artists like Daddy Yankee or Bad Bunny. However, there are so many more artists within this genre of music.
Reggaetón is not just a genre of Latin music, its a culture.
In 2018, Aaron Ampudia and American promoter Chris Den Uijl saw the need to enhance this culture and they founded Baja Beach Fest. BBF is a purely Reggaetón multi-day music festival in Rosarito, Mexico. It went from being an idea to becoming a reality, selling out 3 years in a row.
Project Goals:
The specific goal for this project was to create a microsite for Baja Beach Fest that would enhance the festival goer’s experience before, during, and after the event as well as benefit the business side of the festival.
Discovering the Event
Business Analysis
The Baja Beach Fest mission is to continue to celebrate and uplift Latin culture through incredible music, people, food, and amazing energy.
For the first time, in August of 2021, this Reggaetón music festival will be across 3 days with 2 separate weekends. This will be the first time they feature more high-level artists on the lineup than ever before.
“After just 30 days of dropping the Year 3 lineup, Baja Beach Fest 2021 sold out, making it one of the first sellouts of a 2021 festival during the pandemic.” — Billboard
The success of Baja Beach Fest is attributed to it being an inclusive event for Latinos and hyper-targeting one genre of music.
Lean UX Canvas
The first tool I used to begin my research process is called the Lean UX Canvas. This tool is used for gathering information that is already known and specifying the information that needs to be uncovered.
The canvas helped me with identifying any problems within the business of music festivals, understanding the users/festival-goers, and defining any hypotheses that I had beforehand.
Takeaways:
- Business outcomes should be more ticket sales.
- User benefits include creating new memories and connecting with other people.
- Hypotheses: More ticket sales will be made if the festival-goers can connect with the performers’ music prior to the event.
Competitive Feature Comparison
Next, I used the competitive feature comparison chart to compare different music festivals. This tool helps to identify the features that exist on Baja Beach Fest’s competitor sites.
I noted that the majority of the music festivals have similar features on their websites such as purchasing tickets and merchandise directly on the site, a music player, and videos to showcase the event.
Takeaways:
- Baja Beach Fest was missing some key features that the competitors already have such as a music player on the site and an app for the event.
Market Positioning Chart
The next tool I used is called the market positioning chart. I used it to understand where exactly Baja Beach Fest fits within the market of music festivals.
I compared the festivals based on those within the US and outside of the US. Then I compared them based on whether they focused on one genre of music or multiple genres.
During my research, I found an article where the founders of BBF described how they saw a gap in the market for a destination festival dedicated to Reggaetón. Thus, the founders already discovered an area within the music festival market that was untouched, which is otherwise known as a blue ocean.
“The fans were really calling for reggaetón, so Aaron and I took a deep dive into the opportunity cost and what it would take to do a 100% reggaetón Latin festival,” Den Uijl said.
User Research
To begin my user research, I used a tool called the Survey Canvas. This tool guided the questions that I asked during my interviews and surveys in order to gain a solid understanding of what matters the most during a festival.
Statistics
I interviewed five people and collected 19 survey responses. I found that festival-goers/users consider the lineup and music the most important aspect of music festivals. This finding was also part of my initial hypotheses. However, I allowed the research data to guide my research and development process.
Three key statistics that stood out the most:
- 89.5% of people go to music festivals to see their favorite artists perform live.
- 84.2% said that listening to their favorite song during the festival mattered the most of them, compared to being with their friends or just experiencing food and other things at the festival.
- 63.2% said that the performers matter the most when planning for a music festival.
Takeaways:
- After this data was collected, it was easier to identify potential problems within Baja Beach Fest’s website.
- The lineup is the most important aspect of a music festival and therefore should be focused on the most for Baja Beach Fest’s website.
Define
Affinity Map
During the define stage, I continued using tools to make my research data make sense. The affinity map is used to organize information collected from user research in order to show patterns. With the affinity map, I noticed that the information gathered was mostly related to before the event and during the event.
The common factor was the lineup and the music.
Takeaways:
- Users/festival-goers don’t care much for a festival’s website once the event is over. They visit the website the most before and during the event.
- Festival goers plan for the event (transportation, stay, itinerary, etc.) based on the lineup/performances during the event.
Value Proposition Canvas (Customer Side)
Next, I used the value proposition canvas to dive deeper into:
- The user’s pains and gains with the music festival’s website and overall experience.
- The user’s jobs to be done before and during the event.
Takeaways:
- Users/festival goers care about connecting with their favorite artists through live performances.
- Users can lack all of the information they need in order to make the most out of the music festival experience.
User Personas
A user persona is a fictional person that represents an actual user and is created based on research data. I created two personas: Paola and Miguel.
Paola the planner is the primary user persona and is the kind of person that loves music festivals but she has to really plan for them. She gets frustrated by not having all of the information she needs to enjoy an event. She wants information on things like where the bathrooms & security are located, how much are the drinks & food, and a detailed schedule of the performances.
The secondary user persona is Miguel, the musician. Miguel doesn’t care about the planning he just wants to go and enjoy the festival. He gets frustrated and overwhelmed with too much information. Miguel is looking for easy ways to find the information he needs so he can get back to focusing on the performances.
User Journey Map
Based on the user personas and the research, I created the user journey map. A user journey map is a tool for finding opportunities within user experience to improve. It also helps with empathizing with the user’s journey or in other words it helps to put us in the user’s shoes.
Defining the Problem
My thought process is this: festival-goers are passionate about music the make decisions about whether or not they’re going to a festival based on the performers or headliners of the event.
The Problem:
The Baja Beach Fest website does not focus on the event’s lineup or provide all of the information the users need in a quick way.
How might we:
- Make the planning process easier for the music for the festival attendee?
- Create more emotional connections between the attendees and the performers after the event?
- Make it easier for the attendee to focus on the performance and the music, versus other aspects of the event?
Develop
Brainstorming
I used a mind map to brainstorm possible features or concepts that the microsite should have in order to solve the problem. I wanted to make sure that my ideas were focused on the lineup and the music for before, during, and after the event.
MOSCOW Method
The next tool I used is the Moscow Method. This tool is used to prioritize and separate which ideas were the most impactful and which ones were the easiest to create.
Takeaways:
- Users/festival-goers must have features on the microsite that highlight the lineup.
- The microsite must have a feature that festival-goers can focus on during the event.
Value Proposition Canvas (Product Side)
The product side of the value proposition canvas is a guide for determining gain creators, products and services on the site, and pain relievers.
Takeaways:
- Gain creator — curated playlists of the performers’ music on the website
- Pain reliever — a detailed/interactive festival map
- Potential products & services — recorded footage of the festival for sale
Jobs to be Done
Our festival attendees are not fully equipped with all of the information they need to enjoy the festival to the fullest and focus on the performances.
If we can solve this problem, it would impact festival attendees positively because they would feel more connected to the performers and their music before, during, and after the festival.
It would also benefit our business because festival-goers are more likely to attend the event again if they have emotional connections with it.
Jobs to be done:
- Connect festival-goers with performers and their music prior to the event.
- Help festival goers locate what they need during the event so they can focus on the experience.
- Help festival-goers to reconnect to the event long after it’s over.
Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
I created a minimum viable product or the easiest/most impactful solution based on the research data and tools.
Value Proposition Statement
The microsite’s music playlist of the lineup’s music, the interactive festival map, and the videos recapping previous festivals help festival-goers who want to connect with the music more before and during the event.
Site Map
Using all of this information, I created a site map for the Baja Beach Fest’s microsite. On Baja Beach Fest’s actual website, the lineup is hidden under the Experience tab. In the new sitemap, I moved the lineup to be its own primary tab on the top bar of the website. This will allow users to find information about the lineup faster.
User Flow
I created 3 user flows that represented each MVP.
- Before the festival — the user would click on the lineup tab to view the music playlist.
- During the event — the user would click on the experience tab then the festival grounds in order to access the interactive festival map.
- After the event — the user would click on the experience tab then relive the experience option to watch videos of past festivals.
The first version of the user flow was not perfect. I adjusted the flow based on usability testing through Useberry.
Deliver
Once the user flow was tested and validated, I was able to move on to prototyping to bring the MVP to life. During this li-fi prototyping phase, I sketched the features I was getting ready to fully design. I sketched these features to have a basic example of their functionality. I focused more on the actual design/layout during the mid-fi phase. My biggest takeaway in regards to the lo-fi prototype is that it would be easy to incorporate these features into Baja Beach Fest’s current website.
Mid-Fi Prototype
For my mid-fi prototype, I created for website layout as well as a mobile responsive design. It was important to include a mobile responsive design because chances are that since Baja Beach Fest doesn’t actually have an app for their festival-goers, the users will be accessing information directly from BBF’s website during the event. Festival-goers should be fully equipped with information before and during the event because based on the research that’s when they access the site the most.
Takeaways:
- During the research phase, I learned that users mainly go to Spotify and Youtube to discover new music. The design on the Lineup page for the pre-party music player was influenced by Spotify’s music player layout while viewing in desktop mode.
- I chose to create embedded Youtube or Vimeo videos into the Relive the Experience page. I chose this because it’s something users are already familiar with.
To interact with my mi-fi prototype click here.
Visual Competitive Analysis
Before moving on to the hi-fi prototyping, I conducted a visual competitive analysis. I looked at Coachella and Governor’s Ball’s websites to analyze brand attributes, key features, and overall user experience.
Takeaways:
- Baja Beach Fest’s branding already uses colors similar to its competitors but in a different way. BBF’s colors are fun, exciting, and beach-friendly.
- Each competitor has a specific set of brand attributes that are different from Baja Beach Fest. Each festival’s branding was heavily influenced by the genres of music featured at the festival.
Mood Board & Style Tile
Mood boards and style tiles are used to begin putting together the pieces for design.
Takeaways:
- Mood board — I did several iterations of the mood board and tested it. The first version of the mood board was out of alignment with the brand attributes. I removed some photos and focused the images on expressing the experience a BBF attendee would have. I changed the pictures around so that the mood board would give off more of a group experience and a food-friendly type of vibe.
- Style Tile — I used most of the BBF’s existing branding. I kept the same shapes, logo, and colors however I changed the typography. I selected “Roboto” as a typeface that is slightly different from the brand’s existing typeface. This design decision was made because “Roboto” wouldn’t take away from the BBF logo and make it easy for the user to read the content on the site.
Deliver
Hi-Fi Prototype
The hi-fi prototype was easier to design because BBF’s branding is well established and strong. I kept a lot of their original shapes like the beach ball, stars, and palm trees throughout different website pages. One key takeaway is that I remodeled the Lineup page to include the music player as well as a different layout for info cards on each artist that will be performing. For example, on BBF’s current website a user must scroll through the entire page in order to find an artist. In my new design I separated the artists by the day they will be performing and included a gallery-like feature to display the info cards.
(See examples below)
To interact with my hi-fi prototype click here.
Let’s Recap:
The problem is Baja Beach Fest’s current website does not focus on the event’s lineup or provide all of the information the users need in a quick way.
The hi-fi prototype was focused on solving this problem:
- Before the festival — the user will click on the lineup tab to view the music playlist.
- During the event — the user will click on the experience tab then the festival grounds in order to access the interactive festival map.
- After the event — the user will click on the experience tab then relive the experience option to watch videos of past festivals.
Success Metrics
- Increased usage of the festival map before and during the festival
- Increase in ticket sales for the next event
- Increase in the number of plays in the music player
Failure Metrics
- Low # of views for the embedded videos of prior events
- Low # of plays on the music player
- Higher bounce rates on the site
Next Steps
- Have festival attendees fill out a survey while they purchase a ticket to collect more data.
- More user testing is needed to continue to enhance the navigation throughout the site.
Conclusion
Overall, I truly enjoyed every step in the process of this project. My favorite part of this process was the research phase. During this time I was able to gather information on what makes music festivals successful and what we can do as designers to enhance the digital space experience for users who attend these festivals. We have experienced a massive shift in the way that we use technology, especially for live events and experiences. My biggest takeaway from this project is that we need to adapt to the changes in how we relate to music and live experiences. If we can create a way for users to experience a deeper connection with their favorite musicians online, then we are not only solving a problem but we are setting a new standard for music.
