Timeline: 2022 June (48 Hours)
Team: Austin Leung, Novia Chao, Ian Mah, Vandy Liu, Isaac Chung (two designers and three developers)
Tools: Figma, Miro, Photoshop
🏆 Won Polygon Best UX Design Prize, Lens protocol Best Use and Livepeer Best Use, and more 🏆
View Project Here
Team: Austin Leung, Novia Chao, Ian Mah, Vandy Liu, Isaac Chung (two designers and three developers)
Tools: Figma, Miro, Photoshop
🏆 Won Polygon Best UX Design Prize, Lens protocol Best Use and Livepeer Best Use, and more 🏆
View Project Here
Reverb
Background
Reverb is a project built at the EthNYC Hackathon hosted by EthGlobal, a web3 hackathon that focuses on building on Ethereum. At this hackathon, we had the freedom to build anything that lives on the Ethereum blockchain and were offered the opportunity to build with the numerous web3 companies/sponsors of the event. The event consisted of over 35 different companies that varied in different sectors of web3 and it was up to us to how we wanted to work with them and use their resources.
Our team had a specific interest in the music industry and how the web3 space can make an impact on the use of music streaming platforms for artists and listeners. Reverb is your all-in-one music platform and marketplace for small rising indie artists, with the goal of bridging the artist and listener relationship through the use of NFTs, Tokens and a listen to earn incentives.
Our team had a specific interest in the music industry and how the web3 space can make an impact on the use of music streaming platforms for artists and listeners. Reverb is your all-in-one music platform and marketplace for small rising indie artists, with the goal of bridging the artist and listener relationship through the use of NFTs, Tokens and a listen to earn incentives.
Problem
Research
Before tackling the actual design and ideating too far it was important to gather enough secondary research about existing streaming platforms, specifically understanding models that work and do not work. Firstly we researched into the top music streaming platforms to see what users thought about them.
Competitive Analysis
We dove into three of the most highly adopted streaming platforms, Spotify, Apple Music, and Tidal. With the limited time we had we focused on listing out the pros and cons of each platform and specifically narrowed down the information that is related to what we plan to design.
Ideation
Now that we have a good understanding of how the current streaming platforms work, we are able to solidify our ideas and put together a platform that solves the problems we discovered. With tried to keep the good elements from other platforms, while adding features that can be incorporated through building on Ethereum. We asked ourselves some important questions as we brainstormed making sure what we design continues to align with our problem statement by using the “How might we” framework.
How might we create a model that allows artists to earn more on a streaming platform?
How might we help artists effectively build a name for themselves while creating a community around them?
How might we incentivize listeners to build a relationship with the artists?
Using NFTS and Tokens
The question is how can NFTs and Tokens play a role on this platform and how does it help bridge the gap between artists and listeners to create greater success? In short, an NFT stands for Non-Fungible-Token a collectible that is unique and collected. An NFT can hold different utilities and benefits that can range from a variety of benefits. Tokens are a digital asset that is seen to be equivalent to the modern-day currency that can range in different forms of uses.
Solution
With the combination of low royalties, lack of recognition, and difficulty building community, smaller artists are struggling to succeed. Our team attempted to remodel the use of streaming platforms, by designing our own listen-to-earn model that includes the collection of artist NFTs, earning tokens through listening and using tokens for purchasing artist merchandise, tickets, and more.
NFTs we designed
Our design was inspired by a futuristic glow theme that would match our UI design. Each NFT includes the artist's artwork inside of it.
User Flows
We created a user flow diagram of our product to represent our main flows: listening to music and collecting artists' tokens, collecting artists’ NFT and spending collected tokens.
Features
The features we included were gathered from our secondary research and experiences we have had with the use of streaming platforms and features that are available in the web 3 space. With the use of NFTs and artist tokenization, we created an incentivizing platform for users to support artists they enjoy and encourage artists to use this platform.
Collect NFT
Users have the option to collect artist NFTs to support them and signify their support towards an artist. Artists are able to create a limited number of NFTs for their fans to collect. Also by purchasing (minting) an NFT of an artist, they are able to begin to collect tokens while listening to their music. Users will click into an artist and have the opportunity to mint their limited NFT and begin collecting tokens to unlock the special offers provided by the artist.
Listen to Earn: Tokens
Users who own the NFT for a specific artist will begin collecting tokens through the minutes they listen to the artist's music and be able to use those tokens to purchase available offers the artist offers. Such as merchandise, concert tickets, early access to events and more depending on what the artist chooses to offer. The user is able to see the number of tokens collected in their profile and choose how they want to spend their tokens.
Reflection
Overall our product was a great success, winning multiple prizes and placing as a finalist at this hackathon. We won Polygon Best UX Design Prize, Lens protocol Best Use and Livepeer Best Use, and more. Designing for this project taught me a lot about working in a team as it was important and crucial to communicate very well with our developers as there were different constraints of what could be built and the scope we could reach as we worked with different companies and how they operate on the Ethereum blockchain.
Future Considerations
• If we had more time we want to conduct multiple rounds of user research perfecting specifically our listen-to-earn feature as there are some flaws we came across while designing such as how we can make earning tokens through listening fair for everyone and what the limitations would look like.
• Run usability tests to make sure our flows in our UI run smoothly and catch any pain points we may have created.