The initial assignment of the class was to interview a variety of people about their daily frustrations. I created personas based on my interviews Being a musician, I am around a lot of people who are in bands and I discovered through conversation many of my friends were having trouble managing practice schedules, gig availability, and new song development over text message and Facebook Messanger.

So, I decided I wanted to create a collaborative, real-time Band Manangement System and I'm thinking it's going to look like a calendar, message board, and file storage system all wrapped up into one experience for bands.

Once I landed on that concept, I conducted more interviews to determine what features and capabilities would be the most valuable to this audience, which I formally defined as the amatuer band.

In my conversations, I discovered two very important things:

1. There was a universal drive to constantly be recording and sharing the latest mixes and demos among band members
2. The current solution to the problem (a mix of Google Drive and Facebook) was very sticky because they use these apps everyday

So to create a product that would make this user want to switch, I had to address the frustration on a new level of usability that would provide value beyond the effort of maintaining another platform to organize their life.

This is when I decided to pivot my project into a real-time, collaborative Digital Audio Workstation (DAW), a platform where musicians can record together virtually.

The prototype created from my designs was centered around three user tasks:

• Uploading a song to the DAW
• Editting the song in the DAW
• Sharing the song with other accounts

The tests provided a lot of insight into my prototype. I learned that a lot of the audio editting icons were not recognizable to my audience. While they were inspired by existing icons in DAWs, I realized the audience for my site may not have this background knowledge.

In the gallery is a series of concept ideas for a Dawsome logo. The brainstorm helped me to consider what the essence of the service was and how it could be be represented visually.

But as the design of the prototype came together, I decided to use the loop icon from the DAW in the logo, replacing the "o". The icon and logo represent the collaboration of musicians and the cycle of work that becomes a song.

Testing the prototype of my design allowed me to identify areas within the design that were confusing and an interuption to user workflows. I wanted to create a interface that was simple and reduced the amount of ambiguity exposed to the user. I incorporated learnings from my tests to make an interface that was easy to understand from the start.

I was also able to add color.

You can check out the laptop versions of the workflows here.