01.Context

Everyone's listening to the same music, alone

Music is one of the most shared things there is, and most of the time we experience it through headphones with nobody else in the room.

Streaming made every song available to everyone instantly, and it also made listening a private act. Your favourite album is somebody else's favourite album, and neither of you will ever know.

Meanwhile live music is happening a few blocks away most weekends, often to a half-empty room. We wanted to understand why the gap between those two things is so wide.

02.Research

People want to go out. They don't know where or with who.

We surveyed 26 people with rated statements rather than open questions, so we could see which feelings were strongest rather than which were easiest to describe.

Two results sat at opposite ends of the scale, and the gap between them is the entire product.

The barrier respondents ranked first wasn't cost or transport. It was the difficulty of finding like-minded people to go with. They also told us how they currently hear about shows: Instagram and word of mouth, not ticketing sites or event listings.

03.Problem

Discovery isn't the hard part. Company is.

Finding a show takes thirty seconds. Finding someone to go with is what actually stops people.

Every existing product solves the first half. Ticketing sites list events, algorithms suggest artists, streaming services build you a playlist. None of them help with the part our respondents actually ranked hardest.

04.Ideation

Our first version ended at the venue door

A mentor session mid-designathon pointed out that we had designed the easy half of the night and stopped.

We came in with matching and event discovery. Find someone with your taste, find a show, go. Our mentor asked what happens after the encore, and we didn't have an answer.

It reframed the product for us. If the whole point is meeting someone new, then the riskiest moment isn't the show, it's standing outside at 11pm with a stranger and no plan. Designing for that moment is what makes the matching feel safe enough to act on.

The second note was about simplifying the user flow, and that one was about our own presentation as much as the product. We were trying to show every screen at once. The fix was to focus the main flow and move the detail somewhere else.

05.Solution

Find the crew, then find the show, then get home

Echo pairs local event discovery with a way to meet people whose taste actually overlaps with yours, and follows the night all the way through.

06.Design Decisions

What we chose, and what we gave up

Most of these trace directly back to a number in the survey.

07.Reflection and Next Steps

What I'd take further

The survey shaped this project more than any other decision we made.

Rating statements rather than asking open questions was the right call. If we had asked people what stops them going to shows, we would have heard money and time, because those are the easy answers. The rated format surfaced the thing they wouldn't have said out loud, that they don't have anyone to go with.

The mentor session is the reason this is a product and not a feature. We would have shipped the matching and the event feed and called it done. Being asked what happens after the show is what turned it into something that covers a whole night.

The cold start is the unsolved problem. Echo only works if enough people in one city are already using it, and we designed the product without designing the thing that gets it off the ground.

I'd also want to know whether people would actually message a stranger about a concert. We assumed shared taste is enough of a bridge, and 26 survey responses can tell you people want company, not that they'll accept it from someone they haven't met.