Sofar Sounds
Intimate Concerts in Unique Spaces
THE GOAL Sofar Sounds is a global music community that connects artists and audiences through live music. The business centers around a complex and extensive multi-sided platform with internal (within the company) and external users.
MY ROLE As a Senior Product Designer for Sofar Sounds I am a puzzle-solving, user-advocating, team partner responsible for leading and executing the design process across all phases. I have designed and released over 15+ products and features with Sofar Sounds. In my role, I work with internal team members across all departments of the company, as well as external users including applicants, talent managers, team leaders, contracted organizers, event planners and consumers. Through a combined approach of qualitative and quantitative research methods, intelligent design, and iteration, I make broad, ambiguous concepts manageable. By evolving often complex ideas and intricate user flows into more efficient, simplified processes, it creates an intuitive, valuable experience for users. These new features and products are designed to be integrated into a complex, multifaceted platform. Daily my tasks include obsessing over meaningful details, tackling tough issues and edge cases and optimizing research and design practices at the highest level of standards, all to ask better design questions.
Enhancing the Experience:
Sofar Social
STAYING AHEAD OF THE GAME Sofar was fortunate that, being an event based platform, we were able to innovate and stay relevant during a world pandemic when many companies, particularly, in-person event companies, were disappearing rapidly. Despite the inability to plan and execute live performances, customers still found the access to artists and the Sofar experience meaningful enough to continue to support it. As a result, Sofar not only stayed afloat during the pandemic, but when restrictions lifted shows reopened and quickly surpassed pre-pandemic numbers.
With such success, a novel business model, and having already expanded to over 400 cities worldwide, similar and copycat organizations inevitably began popping up, offering experiences close to those of Sofar shows. As a next-generation platform and leader in innovation, staying steps ahead is always a necessity, and so our team was tasked with finding more ways to engage Sofar audiences.
In keeping with our business model, branding and company culture, it was vital that this new innovation encouraged the community feel Sofar prided itself on, respected the idea that music came first and so did not distract from the artist(s) performing live and encouaraged new connections, friendships and interaction among fans and audiences. As an added bonus, I also included a new way for Sofar to reach out to potential consumers interested in attending shows, thereby growing the customer base with those interested in what we did. Win:win. Enter: Sofar Social.
PROCESS I follow a pretty standard design approach that begins with collaboration with the team that includes product managers, developers, stakeholders and product owners to nail down requirements. Next follows preliminary research which consisted of a series of interviews with Sofar audiences, fans of live music, crew members who set up and ran the shows, and performers. In my own experience as an audience member, I was very familiar with what it was like to attend shows, which added to the insights that came from varying perspectives and view points. Interviews were conducted virtually, live, in-person through volunteers at shows and through surveys and questionnaires.
From there, I compiled and analyzed the research, shared it with my team, and had some brainstorming sessions on various ideas based on competitor analysis, products and features we've released in the past, timing, random ideas and business goals overall. The idea for Sofar Social evolved from a stakeholders request for a dating app (which we vetoed!!), various team members thoughts on wanting to encourage networking without 'networking' and my experience with working on dating apps and chatrooms.
OVERVIEW The concept for Sofar Social is that users are able to chat with each other before and up until the show starts. Users are able to add new friends to their Social Circle and keep in touch. Users get profiles and profile images so it is easier to recognize new friends and aquaintances when they arrive at shows, so for example, if a user is attending a show alone, they may have an opportunity to meet up with new friends from their Social Circle. Sofar crew members, Emcees, Venue hosts and Artists are all able to pop in the chat to say 'Hello' or share exclusive details about the show or the artists performing. This means that those who opt in to Sofar Social get exclusive opportunities, information and ways to be more engaged with performers. When users purchase tickets they are able to invite their guests as well, who receive an automated inviation. Because these guests' tickets were were not their own purchase, previously Sofar had no way of reaching out to them, but with the invitation to opt into Sofar Social, guests are able to share their information with Sofar and more likely to attend future shows. Lastly, users are able to share with member of their Social Circle when they buy tickets to future shows, increasing the odds that larger groups of guests will return for future shows.
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE Once the preliminary details were laid out, I began organizing and structuring. Beginning by creating user personas, user stories and working through user journeys, I created a user flow shown below. The goal was to help users sign up easily, add guests and new contacts, complete tasks like filling out their profile and updating their images, and finally to chat. To do this, I needed to understand how the pieces fit together to create the larger picture. The user flow demonstrates to stakeholders and the rest of my team how items relate to each other within the system.
USER FLOW DIAGRAM
HOW IT WORKS
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Users are able to sign up in 3 ways: at checkout, in confirmation email and via their dashboard.
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Ticket purchasers can invite their guests to join chatroom for that show.
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Chatrooms open up 36 hours before the concert starts and close at showtime.
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Artists, emcees, venue hosts, crew members and artist bookers can join chats.
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Sofar is able to notify users when members of their Sofar Circle have bought tickets to the same show and upcoming shows enticing them to go because others they know will be there.
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Chatrooms are expected to increase engagement. Higher engagement = higher sell-thru rate.
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Once chatroom closes before performance guests are more likely to engage in person.
DESIGN The company had recently began doing a complete overhaul on branding, but because of time constraints and team capacity, only the external portion of the platform was being updated while internal parts of the platform were not. Simultaneously, during this project, the design teams had to update our design system to match the new branding, while continuing to work with the old. It was imperitive to design this product with that in mind. Internal elements of the product that maintained the old branding had to be designed so they could easily be evolved into the new branding when the team was able. What a challenge!
WIREFRAMES From the userflow, I began sketching out concepts. Some wireframe Figma files are included below to show the design evolution.
MIDFI FRAMES
HIFI FRAMES
The Final Product
SOFAR SOCIAL Start the experience before it begins.
KPI's The ultimate way to see if Sofar Social was having an impact on audience engagement, repeat customers, new users, and ultimately more tickets sold, was to look at the things that really matter: email clicks, views, time spent on pages, active chats, usage and ticket sales. We saw improvements as expected, but know that it takes time to see accurate correlation and gage the effectiveness of this new to tool to determine whether we are headed in the right direction in order to meet our business objectives. Here is a list of 9 of our Key Performance Indicators that we use to monitor and determine if our new tool has been a success. So far so good!
