Based on the four interviews that I conducted, outlined in my User Needs blog post (https://cryanyx.com/2021/02/21/user-needs/), there were several competitors identified by the users that I interviewed. Some of these named competitors had more similar functions and business needs as my web-app, and some were used alongside other applications. I believe that this type of live gig, band and venue booking app is quite a niche and novel one that hasn’t quite gained traction, locally. There is therefore no one industry-standard product for me to compare to. For this reason, I will analyse three apps that were identified in the interviews – ReverbNation, Instagram and Spotify. While ReverbNation perhaps has the most common business needs to what I would like to develop, I have included Instagram and Spotify since they are very popular apps that each have specific functions that I am interested in integrating in my product. I will be examining these apps in three parts – features, design and technology:

Live Music Gig Web App: Competitor Analysis

Since completing a detailed competitor analysis, I have created an augmented user journey map in the form of a UX storyboard for the user persona of Raoul in the current (pre-covid) context. The user task in this storyboard is securing a gig in a local venue to launch [Raoul’s] new album of original songs. His journey involves some competitors such as Spotify and Facebook, alongside traditional methods of networking within the music scene, as identified in the interviews I conducted. While this journey map is from the perspective of Raoul the musician, Conall the music booker who I also created a profile for appears in the journey.

As a visual creative, I found the process of creating my first storyboard (unexpectedly in a UX context) an enjoyable one. I used procreate on the iPad to draw each of the panels and then Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator to edit and composite them. I found it so enjoyable that I risked spending too much time on it, when it remains only one component of my research for the brief. I would have liked to panel the storyboard more creatively (like a comic) but I realised that that wasn’t the key learning point of this exercise. In creating this storyboard, I gained greater insight into the user wants and needs- what tools are now available and used to achieve his/her goal and how can I integrate them into my product? How well, if possible, can I digitise some of the traditional face-to-face interactions that are used in this current context? These were questions that formalised for me to contemplate on as I created the storyboard. Had I more time and the resources to do so in a real-world working scenario, it would have been beneficial to do a separate storyboard for the venue persona Conall, as he would be the second most important user of my proposed product. Storyboarding in a UX and software development context, I imagine is also a highly effective tool for presentation (in a product pitch) to clients, the user needs and showing the importance of some features in a product, justifying why they should be invested in.