Make Music Alliance: Platform for Musicians and Venues

Make Music Alliance is a non-profit that organizes the Make Music Day festivals in over 1,000 cities, in 120 countries around the world. These community-led events are held city-wide on the summer and winter solstices. To participate, musicians and venues use Make Music's platform to “match up” and create events. I was asked to update the platform by improving usability and incorporating new features.

A large group of guitarists playing together in a city park on Make Music Day.

I started by conducting a UX audit of the platform and interviewed stakeholders and current users. Next, I developed a strategy for improving and streamlining the task flows throughout the application. Finally, I provided deliverables that used existing visual styles and were ready-to-build for the developers.

Unique Challenge: Managing Hybrid Roles

Instead of matching with venues, many performers want to create their own venue for Make Music Day. For example, a musician might set up in front of their garage. This reasonable scenario presented a role definition issue that wasn’t supported by the existing interface. To solve this, I added an easy step-by-step process to allow an artist to create their own event without creating a separate “Venue” profile.

A venue dashboard showing a self-storage venue's schedule with performer slots booked.

Profile page for a venue

In addition to helping self-matching performers, Make Music wanted to increase communication within the platform. To do this, I used contemporary inbox patterns, and focused the inbox user flow around performance requests. These requests are the main transaction in the application and now everything to do with them is held within an inbox conversation thread.

An inbox of conversations, each a performance request marked pending or confirmed.

Inbox for a Venue

A Venue's view of a conversation thread with a Performer

Sample Documentation

Inbox Flow: Artist Requests Performance, with parallel artist and venue columns.

An application map for the Make Music platform, showing performer and venue profiles.