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At the sheer mention of delving into the world of accounting, many people cower in fear. The thought of managing multiple income streams is tough even for those of us fortunate to receive formal training, be it academic or in the school of life. In my own experience as a touring musician (...it's a long story) I've encountered a great many situations where my (scant) education in accounting has come in very handy. However, there are many musicians (and other touring entertainers) who have had no such fortune.
My goal in designing this app was to address the necessity of having a simple all-in-one tool for musicians to, at the very least, input their income streams and arrive at the all important goal: making sure everyone gets paid accurately.
First and foremost, I wanted to make sure my own experience didn't cloud my design choices. Because I've toured and done my own book keeping, my preconceived notions ran the risk of clouding my judgement. This wouldn't qualify as Design Thinking if I did. To nip this problem in the bud, I made sure to go out and make decisions based on interviews from a wide variety of DIY musicians and entertainers in the South. From Drag Queen Extraordinaire Taylor Alxndr (leader of the venerable House of Alxndr and head of Southern Fried Queer Pride), to the heavy metal bassist of Malevich, and the punk rock road warriors of CDSM and GILT.
A common thread weaved throughout the interview process was how unintuitive Google Sheets felt on mobile. Taylor Alxndr expressed it directly in the interview process, and as I saw during usability testing (more on that later) that "clunky" was a common adjective used when talking about Sheets' mobile interface.
A consideration I also had to take into account that almost all tour payouts are done in cash on the DIY level. That influenced the direction of the app to take in dollar amounts directly from users.
Paypal and Venmo were also heavily used by all artists interviewed to take in income from various sources, like show payouts, sale of merch and music in person and online, and the odd donation. Through the interviews we discovered the need to find a way to account for these income streams in an easy to understand way.
Because I can't design for everyone, I made a persona out of all these folks. Without further ado, I introduce to you Rosa: up and coming musician, certified road warrior, and DIY accounting maven.
To accommodate the time constraints of this project, my DesignLab mentor and I pared down the features to, you guessed it, make the Minimum Viable Product version of GigLedger. We decided that, because of the time limit, the core accounting flow would be what we focused on. In summary, what I defined as the core goals for this project were:
To get my ducks in a row first and foremost, I mapped out the functionality of the site with a user flow. This helped me with organizing my sketches and later my hi-fi prototypes keep to the tight functionality me and my mentor agreed on.
After deciding on the functionality of the MVP, the next step would be wireframing. To save time, I used good old fashioned pen and paper. the format of the ledger view was my interpretation of a hyper-simplified ledger sheet. Something perfect for first time users: money in and money out. That's it.
Once I decided on the basic structure using my wireframes, deciding on color and style would be my next challenge. Due to the time constraints, I opted to keep true to the principals of readability and basics of color psychology.
Green for the connotations of finance, yellow for energy, blue for comfort and stability. In addition, I used just a splash of red for the Expenses column. A deep, blood red would most likely induce anxiety in end users, so I went with a very light pink that met AAA contrast ratio guidelines.
Gentle curved decorative shapes were also used to connote welcomeness, and to give the app an artist friendly feeling.
Blazing through my project timeline (we're barely in week two!), I applied the style to my wireframes and brought them to life in Figma. Even though there were heavy constraints on the content I was to produce for this particular project, I still ended up producing 29 distinct frames in Figma.
As important as getting an aesthetically pleasing design out, is getting something that people can actually use. To ensure that the target audience of DIY musicians would be able to actually use it, I opted to get even more musicians to test the designs. A local indie rock frontman, a heavy metal drummer, a pop rock guitarist, and a road dog label head were all called in for a combination of remote and in person usability tests.
These usability tests involved arming myself with a laptop or a link and setting each musician down in front of a mockup and giving them a small list of tasks to do while recording their feedback in real time. I made sure not to interfere unless they asked me a question directly. While they conducted their tests, I observed where they were hesitating (even if just for a second) and where they seemed to fly through the flow as if they were already pros at using GigLedger.
"Something like this would be really useful... I'd love a tutorial for first time user's though"
"I liked the design of the ledger, I just would prefer it if the center line was visible from the beginning. It'd help me know what was going to happen next"
"[The ledger view] just makes a lot of sense. A lot of people just want [money] in and out"
"It's just less harsh on my eyeballs in general than Google Sheets on my phone. The organization and simplicity promotes transparency with your bandmates... and yourself"
Based on both the verbal feedback received directly from my research participants, and what I gleaned from observing them interact with the payout management flow, I chose to make two major priority revisions to my designs before submitting them for final approval:
Revised screens 1: Adding a center column to the blank ledger view
This is based directly on feedback from one of my interviewees. I also believe that it aids in communicating the functionality of the simplified ledger screen.
Revised screens 2: Adding a distinction between End of Day and End of Tour payouts
This was a revision I chose to make because of a common hesitation I witnessed among almost all test subjects while interacting with the daily and end of tour payouts management screens. While the hesitation was short, that can be the deciding factor that makes them close out the app and go back to Google Sheets.
This project was insanely valuable to my development as a designer. Not only did I have to trust myself when deciding on the scope and scale of the project with what little time I had, it forced me to speed up my iteration time and truly tested my abilities to set a strict timeline and stick to it.
Another wonderful thing that I gained from interacting with so many other real musicians during the research and testing process was a beefy set of future feature requests:
