Design Challenge:
Our team was given an open brief to explore a professional service of interest and build a product that helped to foster trust. Our team focused on the service design of marketplaces, platforms, and local galleries that were using Web 3 technologies to offer services. We hoped to learn more about how art and entertainment transactions might be reimagined through the application of blockchain.
Role:
User Research, UX Design, Product Design, UI Visual Design System, Project Manager
Year:
IxD Service Design Spring 2022
Project Team:
Chrissy Stevens, Bin Gao, Miranda White
Timeline ⏱️
Week 01 | Week 02 | Week 03 | Week 04 | Week 05 - 06 | Week 07 - 08 | Week 09 - 10 |
📝 | 🔎 | 🎯 | 😎 | 🗣️ | ✍️ | 🎨 |
Desktop Research | Field Observation Research | Define Problem | Personas and Journey Map | Build and Pitch Design Concepts | Wireframes and User Flows | User Testing and Reiterate Designs |
Problem 🔎
Music artists struggle to hold full ownership of their intellectual property resulting in unfair earnings for their work. Existing music streaming platforms offer inadequate royalties often limiting creative freedom and fair compensation to artists. As a result many artists, especially those that remain independent, struggle to sustain their careers and connect with their fans effectively.
Insights 💡
- NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) use smart contracts to uniquely identify and represent digital assets. Specific logic coded within a smart contract can enable royalty payments each time an asset is resold.
- NFTs are minted on the blockchain providing a transparent record of each transaction associated with the digital asset.
- Artists can use tokenization to sell fractional ownership of their most valuable assets. Tokenization enables artists to divide an asset into multiple small units represented as an NFT. Just before performing at the 2023 Superbowl, Rhianna and producer Deputy released 300 royalty-linked NFTs that allowed holders to receive 0.0033% of streaming royalties from the song “B**** Better Have My Money”. The collection sold out in just a few minutes.
- Current music streaming platforms pay artists a small percentage, around 0.0031 - 0.008 per stream. The model makes it especially challenging for independent artists to earn a significant amount from their distributed works.
- There is an opportunity to socially engage like minded music fans and curate communities based on mutual music interests.
Solution 🎵
Harmonize is a mobile NFT music platform that leverages Web 3 technologies to help artists to reclaim their creative freedom. The app is designed to make it easy for artists to customize important smart contract terms like resale royalties and percentage allocations on collaborative projects. The user friendly process allows artists to add exclusive perks to their NFTs like tickets to live events, visual albums, limited edition merchandise, and online community access. Lastly, Harmonize seeks to amplify fan communities through each user’s social connections on that platform that are enabled through mutual NFT purchases.
Full case study coming soon 🚀