UHear

Inspiration

Our inspiration for UHear came about through our own frustrations with finding local artists. In a time where everyone is so connected, there is no reason music shouldn't be the same way. Many of our friends are smaller artists, and one of their main frustrations is sharing their music.

After conducting extensive user research on professional musicians both in-person at the Berklee College of Music and through online avenues, a common theme that we realized was that gaining exposure in the music industry is inaccessible to many. This has only been more exacerbated by the pandemic, which “prevented [musicians’ growth] from going anywhere”. Specifically, underrepresented minorities and low-income musicians are more likely to have a harder time gaining footing in the industry. On the other hand, competing platforms lack an artist-centered approach, which hurts smaller creators. As a result, we were inspired to create UHear. Through this, we hope that small artists, such as many of our friends, can more easily gain exposure as people find their events.

There is a Discord for a popular artist named Kenny Beats. Essentially he hosts beat competitions and offers financial prizes to help young talent launch their music careers. One thing he emphasizes is for winners to make content such as tutorial videos. Since his community is so driven to help each other succeed, everyone watches each other's content, supporting one another and boosting their KPIs, such as social media followers, views, and listenings. Creating a community where people are supporting one another and boosting each others’ numbers, raises the attention of young, struggling artists, to the corporate A+R world.

What it does

UHear is the easiest way to find artists from all backgrounds and empowers those looking to share their music with their local community. Many artists from underrepresented backgrounds don't have the means to promote themselves, and as independent artists ourselves, this can be frustrating. UHear is a mobile application that allows anyone to create music events and share them within a 5-mile radius. UHear makes it as easy as possible for artists to share their work with a simple and intuitive user interface.

How we built it

The mobile application was built using Figma Prototyping tools, as well as InvisionStudio to create low-fidelity mockups.

Challenges we ran into

Initially, we were set on creating an application software focusing on recording, editing, and producing audio files for the visually impaired. However, we had to pivot quite a ways into the project after attending “Workshop 3: Understanding User Personas/Research” by Claire Goldwitz, where she advised us to conduct user interviews on musicians instead of the average person as we had been doing. After doing so, we found that a very frequent theme in our research was that it was very difficult for artists to gain exposure, especially those who are not afforded the privileges of a professional network and extensive connections. This wide gap in accessibility in music prompted us to let go of our competing ideas, and work together to focus on empowering small artists in easily sharing their music.

While creating UHear, some of the challenges we ran into were coming up with solid wireframes and design systems before working on our high-fidelity designs. We also struggled to agree on specific design elements in our prototype; however, through the advice of our mentor, Emma Li, we were able to let go of our perfectionism and focus instead on the bigger picture.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We had a lot of setbacks in our project that we are very proud to have overcome. Not only was this the whole team’s first designathon, but also one of our team members, unfortunately, got into a car accident and was out of commission for half of the event. However, through our flexibility and perseverance, we were able to overcome this obstacle and make up for the loss of an important member and create an application that we are proud of. We are happy to say that we have successfully created a full-fledgling mobile application that serves local communities and assists both the user and the artist.

What we learned

One key takeaway from this project was that upfront planning and decision-making make prototyping easier overall. We struggled to architect a solid idea which led to confusion and miscommunication throughout the beginning half of the project. However, once we learned the importance of communication, we were able to create a steady work-flow. Additionally, we learned how to work as a team to create a consistent, and accessible design, although we all had different Ideas of the direction to take our UI.

What's next for UHear

We are aware that there may be bias in our research, due to how we focused much of our user research at the Berklee College of Music, where many are privileged to take financial risks and focus solely on music. We realize that low-income individuals do not have this privilege, so our research may be neglecting the needs and concerns of a potential demographic of users. Therefore, our next steps would be to conduct user research on a wider audience and take into account more underrepresented communities.