Overview

Levon Helm Studios, a historic music venue in the Catskills, wanted to improve the concert-going experience for their newer visitors, who frequently see live music.

• Roles: UX Strategist/Researcher, Service Designer

• UX Team: Kara Snyder (me) with the Levon Helm Studios team (below)

• Timeline: 15 days of effort

• Deliverables: UX project plan, user persona, service blueprint, and the Opportunities to Improve Steve’s Visit deck, which summarizes the team’s ideas and provides an entry point when the venue reopens post-COVID-19

• UX Methods: Project planning, stakeholder interviews, screener survey, user interviews, affinity mapping, user personas, service blueprinting, 2x2 decision matrices, dot voting, and multiple facilitation methods to support collaboration

• UX Tools: Mural, Excel, Zoom, Otter, Google Forms, Google Docs, Google Slides

Challenge

Levon Helm Studios (“LHS” or the “Barn”) is a recording studio/music venue located in the late Levon Helm’s home in historic Woodstock, NY. Levon himself opened his “beloved Barn” featuring his carefully curated Midnight Ramble house band in 2004 and performed with them until his death in 2012. This built a loyal, enthusiastic, quasi-local community of concert-goers.

The LHS team have continued to book musical performers that reflect Levon’s spirit – including legends as well as newer performing artists from somewhat more diverse musical sub-genres. The LHS team has had a long relationship with the long-time, frequent attendees, but recognized that some shows over the last 1-2 years may be attracting new folks to the venue.

Goal

To gain a deeper, more current understanding of these concert-goers, who are new to the Barn, and increase their engagement with the venue by improving their overall experience

Solution

A strategically prioritized plan to redesign the Garage space, where much of the pre- and post-show concert-going experience happens at the Barn

Additional note: This project kicked off in early March 2020 at the onset of COVID-19. After one initial in-person working session, all collaborative work was done remotely. As the live music industry came to a grinding halt, this reduced the scope of this project.

Research

Stakeholder Team

The core operations for the Barn largely rest with my primary contact, Drew Frankel of Impact Concerts, who produces all events at the Barn. Drew brings a decade of music industry experience in the Catskills/Greater NYC region. He’s been very committed to continuously improving the concert-going experience for Barn show-goers and the backstage operations.

After the research insights were gathered, Christy Newman, who manages all operations, and Matt Nobile, who works with Christy and executes many services during live shows, lent their perspectives and expertise to the process.

Initial Kickoff Meeting/Project Plan

With the Barn being a small music venue, there was a limited scope/budget for this project. From my strategy/design perspective, I shared how we might combine fresh user research, the collective wisdom of his operations staff, and some UX/Service Design methods without straining resources.

UX Project Plan

As a newer, solo UX Strategist/Designer (who was previously a CPA and Controller of several startups), it was really important to create some project structure but still allow space for the design process to evolve organically. What resulted was the document below, which was updated twice.

At the outset of a project, it’s difficult to fully understand the complexities that you’ll encounter. An additional challenge for me as a newer designer is that I didn’t have a cache of historical, time-tracking data for estimating projects. Yet, I wanted to communicate estimated scope and budget to the client without it being a total guess. Wanting to grow professionally, I also didn’t want managing stakeholder expectations and budgeting to discourage me from using design methods or tools that were new to me or considered more complex. Notice the complexity factor I added to balance the competing constraints.

Working solo with a client team of non-designers for the first time, a valuable lesson learned was to do a quick, general walkthrough of the Double Diamond process (or similar) model at the outset. Then, I would explain their initial UX Project Plan within that framework. I guided the team well from what we learned to what we do next. Yet, I think a short primer would have better helped the stakeholders orient themselves later.

Screener Survey

Not wanting to prematurely narrow the problem space, Drew and I ultimately decided to start with conducting research with a subset of their newer, Barn concert-goers. When we designed the screener survey, the goal was to identify folks who have:

• Attended one of the 2019 shows at the Barn, where the musical performers were highly likely to have introduced their fans to the Barn,

• Not attended more than 2 shows at the Barn (not Barn “regulars” or Barn Burner membership holders), and

• Attended 7 or more live music events in the previous 6 months

Here are the survey questions we ultimately distributed using a Google Form:

• How many concerts have you attended in the last 6 months? [Choices: 0, 1-3, 4-6, 7-10, More than 10]

• How many shows have you attended at Levon Helm Studios? [Choices: 1,2,3 or more]

• What’s the ZIP code for where you live?

• What is your age? [Provided ranges]

• To which gender identity do you most identify? [For this one, we wanted to offer more inclusive options: Female, Male, Transgender Female, Transgender Male, Gender Variant/Non-Conforming, Not listed, Prefer not to answer]

• Are you willing to participate in a phone interview about your concert-going experience(s)?

• If yes (to being interviewed), what is your name, email address, and phone number?

• If you want to want to be entered to win a $50 Amazon gift card (and haven't shared your email address in the previous question), please share it here to be entered.

We collected 236 responses to our screener survey (excluding my test response). Below are some examples of what the data looked like.

From the 60 possible interviewees that met our primary criteria above, we selected 6 people. We diversified interviewees as best we could based on age, gender, and where they lived.

User Interviews

The central question we wanted to explore through user research was:

What can we learn from these active music fans about their current concert-going experience and how they engage with the Barn?

The goal of these interviews was to elicit as much as we can about: 

• Users’ goals, needs, values, behaviors, pain-points, likes, dislikes, preferences, emotions

• Their journey: expectations, perceptions, actions, mindsets, and emotions

Recognizing that I only had 1 hour with each person, it required some planning to design good questions that would build rapport and elicit the right data. Here are the main sections of the script we used:

Opening Questions

• [Confirm Information from screener survey]

• What does a typical day look like for you? Work? Free time activities or hobbies?

• When do you normally first use the Internet during a typical day?

• What are some of the apps and websites you use the most?

• What role does music play in your life?

• What about seeing live music?

Topic-Specific Questions

• Describe a memorable concert you’ve been to (at LHS or anywhere).

• What motivated you to see a show at LHS?

• How did you hear/learn about LHS?

• What expectations, if any, did you have before you arrived?

• Tell me about a recent show you saw at LHS.

• What was your impression when you arrived?

• What did you do before/after the show?

• Who were you with? Who did you encounter during the event?

• What happened? What did you do while you were there?

• Props: What did you bring with you? What did you purchase at the venue?

• Recall the last time you had a memorable experience at a show (at any venue). What happened? What did you think or feel?

These were high rapport interviews. People were getting to talk about something they love - music and seeing live music. Everyone was relaxed and open.

Synthesis

Affinity Mapping

Six user interviews yielded approximately 250 data points, including observations, behaviors, and quotes. I used Otter to transcribe and review the interviews, which were recorded in Zoom. Lacking a physical design studio, I chose MURAL, a digital workspace for visual collaboration. (When COVID-19 forced New York State to PAUSE approximately one week later, this decision allowed the team to keep working together remotely.)

Affinity mapping allowed us to collaboratively discover patterns, trends, and connections as a team. Because of the heavy cognitive load and mental fatigue, we broke the affinity mapping up into two sessions that were approximately 2 hours each.

In total, we generated 20 I Statements, or insights from the perspective of the user:

User Persona

Creating a persona helps humanize the data and align a team. Starting with the I Statements we generated and the demographic data I collected during the interviews, I drafted a user persona. After a round of questions from the team and a couple of deeper dives into the interview data, meet Steve.

Service Blueprint

Through the user interviews, I gathered a lot of data about Steve’s experience starting from how he learned about the Barn to how sad he felt leaving post-show. Because we were simultaneously working to improve Steve’s experience and deliver value to the Barn, using a service blueprint felt like right next step. The reasoning was that it would help the team:

• Visualize Steve’s journey and the supporting ecosystem

• Evaluate the holistic experience for Steve and the Barn

• Identify strategic opportunities and/or areas of friction

• Create more alignment among the individual team members and awareness of each other’s roles

• Develop more empathy for Steve

To save the team time and make service blueprinting initially less daunting, I constructed Steve’s journey from the research. Drew and I walked through it and made some adjustments to the steps and the sequence. I made an initial attempt at defining the touchpoints, actors, systems, policies, and relevant observations. I layered in the data from the persona and revisited the affinity map/observations.

I facilitated two 2-hour sessions with Drew and Matt and a separate session with Christy to complete the service blueprint in MURAL. We reviewed the sequence of touchpoints, mined the team’s collective experiences, and fleshed out what I had previously compiled. To keep from getting too solution-focused too soon, we generated How Might We (HMW) questions for ideas and opportunities, especially at each critical moment on Steve’s journey.

Other knowledge gained from completing the service blueprint:

• The team learned what friction each other experience in their roles at work.

• Most energy on the service blueprint was clustered between the time Steve parks his car and enters the Barn for the show.

• We learned where most of the team’s ideation energy was clustered. So, we added an additional lane to highlight that.

• Personally, this was my first time facilitating a service blueprint workshop. I’m forever grateful for the folks at Practical Service Design for providing leaner options when you’re a design team of one without a 4-year degree in visual arts. It’s a powerful method.

Opportunity Workshop (Part 1)

The goal of this workshop was for the team to begin evaluating and prioritizing the opportunities we identified with the service blueprint.

In preparation, I brought all of the How Might We (HMW) questions from the service blueprint into a fresh MURAL workspace and created a 2x2 decision matrix. With lots of HMW questions, we dot-voted to select the items we thought would create the most delight for Steve. As we parsed the data, some HMW questions overlapped or felt too solution-focused. So, we removed or clustered some of the HMW questions.

Using the 2x2 matrix (with a team member who was once an engineering grad), we opted to silently dot vote and then plot our data on the Impact for Steve and Impact for LHS axes. Looking at where the data landed on the matrix, you can see that we were somewhat conservative with impact.

Opportunity Workshop (Part 2)

The goal remained the same: To continue evaluating and prioritizing the opportunities from our research. With some fresh energy, we came back to the MURAL above. Then, it was time to start narrowing our problem space and find consensus among the team.

Based on how conservative we were previously judging impact for both Steve and the Barn, it was important to get a better understanding of what impact meant to each team member. The team was aligned with Impact for Steve. For Impact for LHS, the team landed on a definition that encompassed a positive financial and operational impact for LHS.

Starting only with items that had a perceived positive impact for both Steve and the Barn, we used dot voting again. (This team really dug the dot voting, so I embraced it.) Everyone could spend up to 2 votes on any HMW question for extra emphasis. The results are below. Where we ultimately achieved consensus on what to explore next: How might we redesign the garage experience?

Problem Statement

In order to solve a problem, you have to understand the problem. A problem statement helps concisely distill that understanding and highlight the gap between the current (problem) state and the desired future (goal) state. Below is how we defined the problem space, narrowed our focus, and moved into the ideation phase of the project.

Ideation + Design

Ideation Workshop (Part 1/Diverge)

When I’m working with non-designers, this divergent part of the process seems to be what folks expect to be doing right from the start. With how closely knit the LHS team is and how familiar they are with operations at the Barn, I worked hard to keep things from being too solution-focused too early in the process. Maintaining that ambiguous space was uncomfortable at times. However, it ultimately allowed the team to see aspects of the Barn from Steve’s or another team member’s perspective.

Creative tension, if leveraged, can be a force multiplier. If not, it can cause an ideation session to fail. For this ideation workshop, it wasn’t the time for me to be (in the words of Priya Parker) a chill host. To harness the team’s creative output, here was the flow for this workshop:

1. Working Agreements: To provide some guidance and buy-in

2. Yes and: A quick, mental warm-up to feel the difference between divergent ideation (“yes and…”) and convergent thinking (“yes but…”)

3. The problem statement: To highlight our focus for the working session and check for alignment among the team

4. Brainwriting + sharing out: Short, successive rounds of writing ideas silently offset by sharing them with the group, who were encourage to “steal” and build on each others’ unique ideas

5. Current photos of the garage: To remind us what the Garage looked like after working remotely for approximately 6-8 weeks

6. Sample SCAMPER method questions: To provide different lenses for thinking about the problem statement

Here’s what our workspace looked like by the end of the ideation session.

Ideation Workshop (Part 2/Converge)

As a team, we collectively generated 56 ideas for improving the Garage. Next, we needed to evaluate those ideas and build consensus again. By now, the team were total pros with affinity mapping. We were able to quickly parse the possible solutions and spot patterns among them. Even after aggregating some of the ideas, 18 ideas for improvement would likely be a strain for this small team to execute. Taking an iterative approach would also allow for some level of prototyping and user testing as well as help the team manage resources.

Across the different working sessions, we had touched on how innovation requires a balance of:

• People factors (desirable) – Is it worth doing? Is it pleasing? Is it wanted?

• Business factors (viable) – Does this have a reasonable chance of succeeding (or functioning)?

• Technical factors (feasible) – Is it capable of being carried out or implemented?

While holding Steve in mind, it felt necessary to also dig into what was feasible. Through that conversation, we ultimately identified 1 axis of a new 2x2 decision matrix. After a conversation about value and what forms it could take, the team ultimately decided the other axis should be Impact for Steve + LHS. The thinking was that it would keep their attention focused on mutually beneficial solutions. Here’s what it looked like after the team talked it out.

What emerged was a list of Garage improvements that will create a better experience for Steve and likely the staff, too:

• Convert Garage to a lobby/welcoming space

• Overall cleanup + tidying

• Paint and fix the walls

• Make communal table more appealing + sanitary

• Curate a museum-like experience w/ interactive elements

• Improve merch area + its operation/flow

• Add seating/mingling space

• Consolidate + tidy water cooler and storage of bottles

• Better, branded signage

Design (During The Strange Times of COVID-19)

After generating the list of improvements, the team and I chose to hit pause much like the rest of New York State during COVID-19. Public gatherings were still limited to 10 people or under. Live music events are not possible for the foreseeable future. Improvements, like redesigning the Garage, will have to wait. For now, the team has a prioritized list of improvements for the Garage - ones that will improve their primary user’s experience, create more engagement (ideally between guests, staff, and possibly even performers), and likely increase LHS merch sales.

Final Recommendations/Next Steps

• Additional research to understand what makes people feel welcome or feels inviting through a mix of:

  • Barn concert-goer interviews or contextual inquiries at future shows

  • Interior design desk research

• Explore how to design a museum-like experience w/ interactive elements using methods by:

  • Understanding what assets/props exist for display at the Barn

  • Learning from museum curators

  • Conducting additional user research with museum visitors and/or Barn visitors who also visit museums (TBD)

• Conduct user testing with low fidelity (paper and cardboard) prototypes for:

  • New placement of communal food table, water cooler, etc.

  • Museum experience, especially any interactive elements

  • Redesigned merch area, including logistical flow

  • Addition of seating or mingling area

Want to learn more? Let’s connect.