Define —―

What does success look like?

First, we sat together with Jason -- the owner of Fastback Studios -- to learn about the business goals of the studio. We helped Jason identify things that can be achieved through a website, and set up success metrics for those goals.

Who's the target user?

Our next step was to find out the target user group -- people who impact the business goals the most. To do that, we leveraged the two-step ad-hoc persona development method, as shown below.

Sythesizing the "I want / I need" statements, we identified three major client groups -- professional artists, band managers, and "mid-life crisis" amateur musicians.

We weighted each user group by the impact they would have on the three business goals. It turned out that Aaron Artist - the professional musician - was the most decisive user group.

Insight: genre match and producer's skills are the missing info

As soon as identifying the target users, we conducted surveys, interviews, and competitive testing with a total of 17 professional musicians to understand their decision-making process in booking recording studios. Alongside the basic studio info such as hourly rates, gears, studio space, etc., we found out two factors that Aaron would specifically look for, yet largely under-addressed in most studio websites including Fastback Studios':

Ideate —―

Addressing user questions in a natural flow

Based on our research, the new website should help answer three key user questions:

Q1 - Are you experienced with my genre?
Q2 - How good are you at mixing and producing?
Q3 - How do I book your service?

We addressed those questions through wireframe design.

Visual design —―

Finding the right visual language

Finally, we asked Jason three questions to understand Fastback Studios’ brand tenets:

Q1 - How you want people to interpret Fastback Studios?
Q2 - What makes Fastback Studios unique?
Q3 - In an ideal future state, what 3 words would you use to describe Fastback Studios?

From there, we recognized three brand tenets and translated them into design guidelines.