An app to help emerging artists level up

Timeline

2018
Red Bull Music (f.k.a. Red Bull Sound Select) is a development program working to grow the careers of emerging artists from around the world, and showcasing them through a series of concerts and festivals rooted in local music scenes. With hundreds of live events thrown worldwide every year, Red Bull Music’s field teams need to regularly feedback on artist performances to help tailor future development strategies for each artist.

The Challenge

When it came to evaluations, Red Bull Music field teams would often write their feedback long after an event was over, when memories of what happened weren’t as fresh in the mind. Not only did feedback cover inconsistent topics, but they were also submitted using a variety of different apps and file formats, making it incredibly difficult to collate all information into a comprehensive report.

The Solution

We designed a simple native iOS mobile app for field teams to use at the events to capture feedback live as things were happening. To steer away from writing on irrelevant topics, each new evaluation would already have criteria predefined. Evaluations could be submitted in-app, which would then be automatically collected and compiled into a single artist report card accessible via Red Bull Music’s backend platform.

What I Did

Defined the user flow, wireframing, high fidelity UI design, protoyping, developer handoff.

Create new evaluations, hassle-free

On days where there are events, our field teams are on site at the venues working hard behind the scenes and out front. Since they also have to squeeze evaluating artists into their busy schedules, we saved them both time and headache by streamlining and dummy-proofing how new evaluations are created in the app. Instead of requiring them to write out cumbersome details like the date, event and venue names with every evaluation, team members only need to find their event from a pre-populated list, choose an artist performing at said event, then get right to evaluating.
A screen flow from the artist evaluation app demonstrating how quick and easy it is for users to create new evaluations.

Standardizing evaluation data

In the past there were no ground rules around what to evaluate for and how evaluation content should be structured, which made it a challenge to uncover meaningful insights. So we purposefully designed the app to focus our field teams on only evaluating five specific predefined criteria for each artist. With every criteria item, they tap a 1-to-5 star rating and leave comments explaining their rationale — in the end, producing a clear set of quantitative and qualitative data for future review.
A collection of screens from the artist evaluation app detailing the different types of evaluation criteria.

Other key features

A screen from the artist evaluation app demonstrating photo and video attachment functionality.

Attach Photos & Video

Include any photos and / or videos you’ve taken of the artist’s performance to send in with the evaluation.

Toggle between evaluation drafts

Create multiple evaluations and jump between your drafts at any time.

A screen from the artist evaluation app demonstrating how users can access their incomplete evaluation drafts.
A screen from the artist evaluation app demonstrating how users can access their past evaluations.

View past evaluations

Evaluations you’ve already submitted can be reviewed within the app.

User flow & wireframes

A user flow diagram documenting the entire app interaction flow.

Results & final thoughts

Evaluations completed through the app resulted in much more consistent, high quality reporting, and provided stakeholders far better insights to help artists succeed. If time had allowed for it, we would have liked to include onboarding steps for first-time users; but given that the user base was limited to a small handful of internal teams at Red Bull Music, we determined that forgoing this feature in favor of an in-person walkthrough was an acceptable trade-off.

Up Next:

Red Bull Music Backstage