Gig Boss
Role
UX Researcher, UX Designer
Practices Used
Cognitive walkthrough, Contextual inquiry, User interviews, interactive prototyping
Client purpose and goal
Gig Boss is a mobile app that was created for gig musicians and freelancers to help its users organize, streamline and simplify their schedules and finances.
User goal
To have an app that serves as a one-stop shop where users can go to track their events, resource musicians and clearly track gigs for tax purposes.
Cognitive walkthrough
After understanding both client and user goals, it’s important to test the products usability as well as the design in its current state. To do that initial testing for this project, my team used the method of cognitive walkthrough.
Including the clients request for a number of key tasks to be tested, my team completed a walk through of the app to learn how the app is being used. With the use of cognitive walkthrough, were able to understand if we could achieve the right outcomes, as well as identify any areas that could interfere with the usability of the app.
Overall, the app has a great experience, but through our cognitive walkthrough findings, we found certain functionalities of the app that were less intuitive than others. With those noted, we were able to create our user script for our upcoming user interviews.
User interviews
After completing the initial intake and research of this project, my team was able to move onto interviewing users by using contextual inquiry, a method that allows the user to show us how they use the product, in our case, the Gig Boss app.
Initially we had two users of the Gig Boss app that agreed to be interviewed, both musicians. At the last minute, one was not able to make it, however we were able to find another musician who was willing to be interviewed.
Both musicians provided my team with great insight into how this app is helpful, unhelpful and could better serve them.
Here were our findings….
Findings and feedback
There were two main functions for improvement that were brought up by both users :
A place to quickly resource musicians
To be able to review your finances throughout the year for tax purposes
“I’d like to use this app in the future to do that, you know and make sure that like - okay, I made this much money...I have to file.”
User A
“That’s not the way that I would want to use it. I think I’d want a big list of everyone that I know that I usually work with and I would want to find the gig and then just maybe I would have it broken up by instrument, actually.”
User B
Recommendations
Taking the changes from my ‘Findings and feedback’ into consideration, my prototype represents my recommendations for changes based on interviews and research. Additionally, view my full video walkthrough here.
If I were to further develop the Gig Boss app, I would add a new icon for ‘Individuals’ on the bottom navigation link to allow user to quickly add new musicians. Also adding specific personal details in the ‘Books’ section to give users the confidence to track their annual finances.