Westbury Music Consultants
Enterprise UX Design
The problem
Westbury Music Consultants collect Neighbouring Rights income from over 23 different countries. Each of these countries (or societies) have a different way of registering a performer, claiming for roles and recordings and paying a performer.
The team at Westbury were managing all of this in spreadsheets and found that they couldn’t represent any more performers and make more income because the manual process they had was very time consuming. This meaning that they had reached their earning potential unless they hired more staff or changed the way they worked.
So this is exactly what I did.
My role
- User research (Qualitative interview)
- User personas
- User journeys
- Empathy mapping
- Story boarding
- Information architecture
- Performance benchmarking
- UX/UI Design
- Lo-fi wire framing
- Branding
- User testing
- Hi-fi prototyping
Research
As this system was to be designed for admin and client, I carried out qualitative interviews with both types of end user to understand their pain points. I chose one-on-one interviews for this initial research as I wanted to delve into how each user thought and felt about the current process.
During the admin interviews, I found out that the majority of time was spent registering a client as each society had their own membership form that had to be signed by the client, meaning 23 physical signatures.
Also, during the distribution of funds to the clients there was a lot of manually keeping track of where the money is and updating a spreadsheet after each transaction. Bear in mind there could be thousands of transactions in one day!
With the discography process, the team member in charge had to manually search the internet to ensure all of a clients recordings and roles had been registered at each of the societies, again a very manual and time consuming process.
The client interviews informed me that most performers just want to know how much they are going to be paid and being able to register their own recordings would be a bonus.
Analysis
After I had analysed the data from the interviews I created an affinity map, allowing me to quickly group my findings. I also created a big picture story board to highlight the main pain points of the admin user and further understand how they feel when going through the current process.
User personas & journeys
I created user personas as there was a lot of feedback during sessions and I needed to focus and clearly understand the users goals and frustrations.
Due to there being many areas to the business model, I created user journeys for each area. This allowed me to begin to think about the wireframes I was going to create and what screens would be needed.
UX design
I designed lo-fi wireframes for each business area using the user journeys to guide the experience.
The solution
Due to there being many complex needs within the business that could change any time a society decided to change their way of working.
I introduced a society configuration feature where Westbury Music admin can tell the system what information is needed for each business area to run smoothly with this society.
Usability study - admin portal
Testing early on in the design process allowed me to work with Westbury Music Consultants admin team to ensure that I had designed a user friendly system that covered all jobs they were doing manually.
“It’s very usable, very user friendly. I wish I could just sit with the system already.” – Onboarding team member
Branding
After a branding workshop with Westbury Music Consultants, they came to the conclusion that they wanted the brand to be authoritative, techie, trustworthy, sleek and cutting-edge.
UI design & prototyping
Whilst creating the design system and UI of this product I kept the WCAG compliance levels in mind, using a Figma plugin to grade the accessibility on each page.
I incorporated various accessibility considerations such as accompanying coloured icons with text, adding placeholders and labels that are accessible by screen readers, and adding alt text to any imagery used.
I also ensured that when being developed the interface could be navigated by keyboard and mouse.
Usability study - Client portal
I conducted user testing with 4 participants from Westbury’s current client base.
I analysed and synthesised the feedback and the most important changes were made due to time constraints.
Outcomes
- Reduced the time it takes for an admin user to set an artist’s terms of agreement from a range of 30 minutes to 3 weeks down to a range of 2.5 mins to 7 mins.
- Automated the process of filling out a mandate, power of attorney and 19 membership forms, saving the admin user 30 minutes per artist.
- Submitting membership forms to societies previously took an admin user 2 hours per artist.
Now, 19 membership forms are submitted automatically and 4 have to be posted, reducing the manual input to 20 minutes. - An admin user previously had to mark each artist registered at 23 societies in a spreadsheet taking her 23 mins per artist.
This is now done automatically when the artist membership ID is entered reducing admin time spent on onboarding an artist.
The admin portal has launched and due to clients changes the artist portal is currently going through some iterations.