Friend is an essential part of people's lives, but now young people find it increasingly difficult to make friends, even if they go to social activities, and use social software, here are some problems:
I designed LiveLand, a mobile app that offers my users a platform to make friends through Live House. It also enables users to know who will go to the same Live House as them in advance, in this way, people can make an appointment with others ahead of time.
I started the project having a vague idea that I hope to help young people to make friends. According to the Problems, I thought there were two elements of being friends :the same interests & the experience of being together. To begin with, I try to find the intersection of these two elements.
In order to further understand the problem and the social status of target users, I did a survey on the characteristics of urban young people. Here are some main characteristics(Number,Feeling and Willing of urban youth):
When urban young people are free, they will participate in activities related to their hobbies, especially sports and music. Usually these activities will gather a group of strangers with common hobbies.
I chose three scenes from these two mainstream hobbies. By analyzing the behavior of people in these three scenes, I chose livehouse as the theme of Liveland for the last time. Here is the comparasion between GAME, CONCERT and LIVE HOUSE:
Live House originated from the band culture. It emerged from Japan and has gradually become popular in China in recent years. It has become a popular choice for entertaining among young people in many cities. Here is the history of Live House:
Since the Live House culture is just entering the mainstream in China, that is, it’s history is only about ten years, so people's understandings of it is uneven. Based on my observation of fans who like to listen to live music, I found that their understanding of livehouse can be divided into three categories.
• High Demand of Social Life: For the urban young people who are very easy to be lonely nowadays, an occasion where they can enjoy music among people is what they expect, since they can both feel accepted and have fun.
• Good Prospects of Music Market: In China, more and more urban young people will be interested in livehouse, even regard livehouse as an indispensable part of entertainment life, since livehouse can meet their music needs well.
• Nice Acceptability of Live Music: Livehouse symbolizes a culture with love of life and freedom. It is a light culture, which is easier for young people in cities to accept and use it to release pressure.
By investigating the social situation of young people in the city and their love of Live House as a new social place, I decided to conduct a deeper investigation.
According to my observation, people who like live music can be roughly divided into three types, so my questionnaire first verifies whether my observation is accurate, and then surveys these three types respectively. Here is the result of 40 people's questionnares:
• The reason why people who haven't been to or rarely go to Live House is that they can't find a companion, so they don't know how to participate a livehouse.
• The reason why most people don't frequently go to Live House is that they like a single type of music, or like a certain style of musicians, but the weekly performer of livehouse is not fixed.
• People who often go to Live House regard it as a way of life.
Through the questionnaire, it is further confirmed that people who like Live House can be divided into three categories. To study more about the social difficulties of these people will meet, I interviewed 3 of them. I found that:
• People who want to enjoy Live House but have never gone there before usually want someone who know Live House well to take them there and tell them what to wear or how to enjoy it.
• People who like Live House but don’t go to livehouse so often want to meet some friends who are the fans of the same style of music or music performers.
• People who go to Live House frequently hope that more and more people will understand and like Live House. What's more they want to meet some new friends who also love live music.
To better guide my design, I further synthesized the interview results and came up with the following personas:
To further define users’ actions, I created user flow to gain a better understanding of how users will use it.
Based on the insights of research, I defined 4 main features: personal image, interactive space, discovery page and discussion group.
Here is the information architecture that I created for the site:
At this stage, I created most of pages based on the information architecture.
Considering that this project is associated with Live House, in order to better cater to the atmosphere of it, I choosed the color categories from the real scene and modify it according to the actual application effect.
