Capstone Case Study
Have you ever sung karaoke? If you’re anything like me you’ve had a blast singing karaoke with your friends, and you probably understand why it’s taken the world by storm since its invention in 1971.
Ever since those early days karaoke has been an art form tied to technological advances yet after 2 plus years of social distancing there is still no viable remote karaoke product, until now!
REMOtaroke - Case Study Overview
Drawing inspiration from the impact that COVID-19 social distancing restrictions have had on karaoke I designed a remote karaoke extension for video conferencing software such as Zoom, Skype, or Google Meet to help make it easier for people to sing when they want, where they want.
I created REMOtaroke for my capstone project over the course of a 12 week immersive UX Design Diploma boot camp at BrainStation. I used human-centered design and design thinking methodologies to identify & understand the problem space, gathered quantitative and qualitative research data to test my hypothesis and assumptions, and finally designed, wireframed and prototyped a digital solution.
Goals
Create a high fidelity prototype for a single task flow of a digital product experience that addresses a current problem space.
Timeline
10 weeks
Deliverables
High Fidelity Prototype
Responsive, Single Page Marketing Website
User Interface Library
Tools
InVision
Figma
Pen & Paper
Skills
Competitive Research & Analysis
User Interviews
Wireframing
Prototyping
Usability Testing
Pivoting
Graphic Design
Project & Product Management
UX Writing
Marketing
Ideation
Brand Development
Design Thinking
Human-centred Design
Introduction
COVID-19 has had a profound impact on society, from the way we teach, learn, do business, and play, to the ways in which we conduct ourselves on a day-to-day basis. It is from this basis that I found inspiration for this project, specifically drawing from the impact that social distancing restrictions have had on karaoke.
Karaoke is a physically intimate activity, from the small rooms of private booths to the cramped and crowded bars to the microphones being shared and salivated upon passed between friends and strangers without consideration or concern for sanitation.
In response to social distancing requirements many workplaces, hobby spaces, and other activities took to online venues to conduct their continued operation. However, karaoke languished with no products entering the market to do what Zoom did for meetings and classrooms, or what DoorDash did for restaurants. As such in the problem space, I identified both a user need and a market opportunity. I was elated that my design might not only serve users but be viable from a business perspective, for if a company utilized my product it could be the first mover for online karaoke and be able to seize the market.
Hypothesis
Are people singing less karaoke due to COVID-19 and is karaoke good for people?
Diving Deeper - Key Research Findings
Research has linked health benefits to those who sing, including better overall mood, improved stress levels, and a balanced immune system. Research has also found that positive social interactions provide a plethora of psychological and physiological benefits.
Social distancing measures introduced due to the COVID-19 pandemic have had a severe impact on spaces in which social singing takes place. For example, the market size of the karaoke bar sector dropped by 20% in 2020, bucking a multidecade year-over-year growth trend.
Attempts to resume in-person karaoke through the pandemic have been made. Some bars have tried using physical measures to protect participants. There have also been a variety of attempts by consumers to create an ad-hoc remote karaoke solution in place of a dedicated digital product. This article from vulture.com outlining one group’s combination of a Google Doc plus zoom.
It is difficult to find direct quantitative research on the social affects of karaoke, so I delved into related topics and found that my initial assumptions from the early stages of the project were correct. People weren’t singing as much karaoke, and singing karaoke provides a variety of positive impacts on the lives of those who sing it. I found evidence that there was a market for a dedicated remote karaoke solution.
How Might We?
Taking my research into account I formalized my understanding of the problem space into a design question:
How might we increase the safety of the karaoke experience so that participants don’t contract COVID-19 in order to allow karaoke enthusiasts to continue to engage in the hobby.
Through the lens of human-centred design, I saw an opportunity for a solution to these problems: an extension to the functionality of existing popular video conferencing products.
Understanding Users - User Research
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In speaking with 6 karaoke enthusiasts in my user interviews I gained new insights into how they experience the problem space, and through conducting this qualitative primary research, I developed a better understanding of the pain points that exist.
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have experienced karaoke,
understand the differences between Stage Karaoke and Private Room Karaoke,
and are able to provide roughly 15-25 minutes of their time.
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Hello! Thank you for agreeing to participate in this research interview for my student capstone project! All the data collected will remain completely anonymous, as the information is being collected in order to form a generalized “Karaoke User”
Are you comfortable with me using software to transcribe our interview?
What is your signature karaoke song?
Tell me about a memorable karaoke experience.
What’s your favourite thing about karaoke?
What’s your least favourite thing?
Tell me about a time you did karaoke before the COVID-19 Pandemic.
Tell me about a time you did karaoke in the time since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
What stands out to you as being different between those experiences?
Imagine a friend of yours has a birthday this weekend and has invited you to a karaoke night at a local bar.
What thoughts or feelings would you have about this?
Are any of those thoughts and/or feelings informed by safety considerations as it relates to COVID-19?
Would you go, and why / why not?
Would any of this change if it was private room karaoke?
What are your thoughts on singing karaoke at home?
If you had the right equipment to do so what would be fun about that?
What would be difficult about that?
Thanks for your time!
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I found that the majority of users find that karaoke brings them closer to their friends. Themes of community, vulnerability and group cohesion came up often.
Personas
After interviewing my potential users and summarizing their pain points, motivations and behaviours I understood that there are two primary roles in the karaoke experience that are most severely affected by the problem space, host and guest.
Hosts organize the event and administrate song queue selection and other duties. Guests choose songs, sing them, and fill out the event attendance.
It became clear that the project constraints would require me to design one of these two roles to design for. I designed for the host role as it presented more opportunities for design interventions because of their more complex set of duties. If I choose to continue working on the project I could base many of the guest interactions on the functionality built for the Host functions.
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Mav is a karaoke lover who because of the social distancing restrictions of the last several years has been missing out on her friend group’s weekly ritual of gathering together and unwinding the week’s stress at the local karaoke bar. She decides she would like to Host a zoom karaoke night and thus our user story begins by describing the current problem space.
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Bartending introduced Gav to karaoke. He loves the unique sense of community and public spectacle that is provided by karaoke. Since the beginning of the pandemic he’s tried doing at home karaoke with some of the members of his bubble but the advertisements between songs really ruined the vibe for him, plus he feels it’s not really the same without strangers to perform for.
Experience Map
I considered Mav’s experiences further in how she would potentially go about setting up a remote karaoke get-together with her friends.
In this experience map, we can identify what she sees, does, thinks and feels throughout the process and where key opportunities for design interventions exist.
Mav’s karaoke night was challenging, as she experienced several pain points along the way including guests having trouble queuing songs, and technical difficulties derailing the event.
IMPENDING ERROR
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IMPENDING ERROR ⛔
Task Flow and Pivot
I generated a series of User Stories based on Mav’s experience map. The majority of my user stories from this dealt with the technical challenges of hosting a remote karaoke night, and so I decided to move forward in the process and design a task flow for the Epic ‘Preventing Technical Difficulties’. This proved to be a dead-end in my process as it did not address my minimum viable product.
“Zero technical difficulties is not a product!”
This presented an excellent opportunity for me to practice my project agility skills and execute a pivot. The decision to do so was difficult. I considered if I could fake it and move the project forward because I had committed many hours of work to the dead-end path. Yet I knew that it was best for the project and my own learning if I took on the design debt and moved backward in the project in order to move forward.
I kept my MVP in mind when deciding on my pivot task flow and designed a solution for the song queue & song queue maintenance epic.
Sketching & Brainstorm
Sketching potential design solutions to the song queue task flow and further ideating on potential solutions.
Lo-Fi Prototype
I created a grayscale wireframe prototype to facilitate user testing of my solution.
I conducted 2 rounds of testing with five users. After each round of five user tests, I analyzed the testing data and created a design prioritization matrix to maximize the effort to impact ratio in any iterative changes I wished to make.
Big ol’ redlines here indicate a key piece of user testing feedback I integrated into the design solution: Users found the separate windows for queued songs to be unintuitive.
Visual Identity & Branding
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Mood Board
My branding process was to make mood boards, distill them into their strongest parts and extract the vibes into distinct repeatable forms such as…
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Colours
Colours that are prominent in the lighting of dance clubs.
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Fonts
Lato, a humanist font, because karaoke is a very human activity.
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Wordmark
A wordmark that utilizes a visual hierarchy of information in order to help the user pronounce the long phoneme salad that is REMOtaroke.
Solution
Lightly branded version of REMOtaroke. As a white labeled product it would of course take on the design system of whichever company purchases it.
Marketing Website
I created a one-page marketing website for REMOtaroke utilizing responsive web design techniques making the site work for both desktop and mobile viewports.
“If you’re like us, you miss the roar of the crowd, the thrill of the spotlight, and all the other incredible feelings of karaoke. REMOtaroke is an all-in-one karaoke extension for your favourite video conferencing software. Featuring easy-to-use controls, a catalogue of over 48,000 songs from every genre imaginable, and enough powerful hosting features to satisfy even the most seasoned Karaoke Jockey / Host. So go ahead, grab your phone or laptop, and join the fun! There’s no better time than now to let your inner diva shine!”
Final Thoughts
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This project allowed me to empathize with a diverse group of people through my interviews and usability testing. I was given the opportunity to understand a multitude of outcomes and motivations bring people to karaoke. It was through this understanding and by engaging in the design process that I was able to conceptualize a new facet of what my definition of UX is: User Experience Design is the practice of helping people get from point A to point B. By providing elegant pathways that are wide-ranging and flexible in the applicability of their usage cases we can allow any user to arrive at whatever their desired outcome may be.
This design would allow people to better connect with their friends and families. Furthermore, with the advancement of new digital spaces such as web 3.0, I believe that we’ll inevitably see nearly all hobbies adopt a remote digital model, if not primarily at least secondarily. Karaoke is unique in that all of its current digital solutions are reminiscent of web 1.0: clunky and non-collaborative. This indicates a fantastic opportunity to be THE first mover in karaoke’s future state, from video conferencing extensions and beyond.
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Coming soon!
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Coming soon!
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Coming Soon!