Context

Community Music Center was founded in 1921, allowing new and pro musicians to come  together and learn music. Community Music Center makes high-quality music education accessible to people of all ages, backgrounds and abilities, regardless of financial means. CMC offers a generous tuition assistance program, because they believe that everyone deserves equitable access to high-quality music education. Community Music Center’s website provides a wealth of information regarding the organization -- program offerings, enrollment, events, facility rental, news articles, etc.

In light of COVID, Community Music Center had to move most of their programs online. Although they have made a successful transition in providing online options, and there is a good amount of interest, they’ve noticed a significant drop-off in enrollments and donations.

Team Considerations:

• What are some opportunities to enhance the experience of their enrollment process?

• What are some ways to increase donations?

Design Research

Heuristic Evaluation

We performed a heuristic evaluation to pinpoint evidence of areas within the current website’s design that needed to be updated to remain in good standing with Desktop Website Standards.

• Aesthetic and minimalist design- Cluttered design, Oversized text causing prolonged scrolling, long footer

• Error Prevention- Inputting personal information notifies the user where they need to input correct or missing information.

• Flexibility and Efficiency of Use - Duplication, pressing on enrollment does nothing but refreshes the page.

• User control and freedom- Leading to a new tab: donation page

Site Map

This is a look at the site’s navigational map at the start of the project. As you can see, there is a lot going on with lots of pages and subpages.

Task Analysis

We asked volunteer participants to allow us to watch them perform certain tasks on the current website. We found that users struggled to complete certain tasks due to the site’s navigation being too long and too confusing.

Key Takeaways:

• 50% of users successfully passed all tasks

• 100% of Users interpreted ‘Support’ as technical support rather than Donation support, found it confusing

• 100% of users found the Online Learning link confusing due to dead end links

• Global Navigation is not intuitive, there are too many unnecessary categories

• 100% of Users enjoyed the sort feature on Enrollment, however they did not like the placement of it

Business Analysis

Surveys and Interviews

We asked volunteer participants about their experiences with learning musical instruments as well as taking online music lessons. We found some important insights from this research.

The most important factors that users considered were price of tuition, reviews about the class, detailed information about instructor and availability date.

The most concerning factors were staying motivated and understanding expectations of lessons, and effectiveness.

Most important factors:

Tuition, Reviews, Instructor, Availability

• 100% of users are willing to donate to a musical cause if they know it gives back to the community

Concerns: 

Motivation, Understanding Expectations, Effectiveness

• Concerns about online lessons: Worried about obtaining musical supplies, worried about proper tuning techniques.

Competitive Analysis

Little Mission Studio

• Offers group music classes

• Music workshops

• Private lessons in various instrument groups

• Offers Summer music camps

• Provides online classes

• Teaches all ages

Key takeaways:

Compared to our competitors, our strength was that we provide more affordable services and beginner classes for both youth and adults. We want our users to see what differentiates us from our competitors.

Card Sorting

We ran a card sorting workshop in order to get user input based on where they would naturally place different categories of content. Our findings showed that users grouped the names of the various links into 7 key categories in the Global Navigation. This information was pertinent in having us redesign the site’s navigational structure to create ease of access.

User Flows:

Finding a Happy Path

User Task 1: Enroll in a private guitar class

User Task 2: Find a class that fits your budget 

User Task 3: Make a donation

This sample User Flow describes the happy path to achieve Task 1, which is to enroll in a private guitar class. We created 3 separate user flows to demonstrate how a user navigates through obstacles to find their Happy Path, which is a path that ends in a successfully completed task.

Sketches

We decided to begin sketching our design ideas based off of the happy paths we created. We thought of different ideas for each page, seeing how they would look when we drafted our initial wireframe.

Lo-fi Wireframe

Next, we took our process from paper, to digital by constructing our low-fidelity Wireframe. We used this draft to allow volunteers to explore it so we could document their experience navigating through the pages.