Week 13: Website Development

This is a video demo of how my website design looked after a few hours of designing from scratch using WIX (free website design) - this is the version we used in our focus group session. 
I received the following feedback:

• more modern electronic font
• darker colours
• more modern electronic style graphics at top of page
• shots of artist performing
• more colourful pictures/filters

- I began to make the changes over the course of last week.

I changed the font to a more modern font with a slightly Italian touch.

I changed the graphics at the top of the page.

I added filters to the front page photos and found better pictures I had taken on my phone that suite the tabs better.

I changed the gallery page into a "subscribe to mail list updates" page because we did not have enough high quality and aesthetically pleasing photos to choose from - the subscribe tab is the other most popular tab on websites like Duke Dumont and Disclosure.

I embedded our final video cut onto the video tab.

I added some more dates to the artist's tour to make him seem more popular and busy.

I also redesigned the store tab to look more legitimate with a WIX "Buy Now" widget.

Each page on the tab has their assigned picture blurred out as a background .

Week 12: Focus Group for our 3 Products

Our focus group took place today - we successfully received some eye-opening feedback, although the group was very shy, and so, not as many thoughts were put across as we'd hoped.

Here are the notes I took during the session:

Moving forward, we have identified the key representations of Ramoso's Star Image as modern, partying, cool and sexy. Therefore we need to make sure that our products (the website and digipak especially) strongly represent these ideas.

The response from our focus group circulates around the motions that: 

• The digipak design needs to be slightly darker or more modern and minimalistic to match the style of the website and video. 
• The shots of Gareth on the website and digipak need to feature him wearing more modern clothes (better representing electronic music). 
• The fonts and clip art on the website needs to suite the style of EDM better. 
• The website needs some stills of the artist performing/DJing "live".
• The stills should have coloured filters instead of black & white.

Week 11: What is a focus group? - Preparation

The purpose of a focus group is to trial our three products (Video, Digipak & Website) on members of our target audience who have never seen them before. Note: it is not to get approval from the focus group. As a result of holding a focus group, we can receive observations that we were unaware of before about how the products may be interpreted and suggestions for how the products could be refined to make more effective.

During the focus group, an unbiased facilitator will ask the group questions that are as open and neutral as possible, in order to get an honest answer on any topic.

It is important that we show our Digipak and Website before we show the video, so that the actual style of music and artist image is not given away, therefore receiving an answer that is untouched by the knowledge of what the products are meant to look like. We must also not defend our products as this will intimidate our group and they will react in a more polite and filtered way - therefore we won't receive the full opinions and views.

Here are some notes I made on how to carry out a focus group:

PREPARATION

Firstly we exported the current version of our video onto a USB, printed out 5 of our digipak designs in full-scale and folded them into shape, and published the current version of the website.

Then we prepared around 8 questions to ask in the session:

We appointed Victoria (not in our group) as the unbiased facilitator to run the session and ask the questions - we gave her the questions.

We appointed myself as a scribe - to write notes on their feedback - and Ed as the recorder - using a phone to audio record the session (in case the scribe missed anything). We used an audio recorder because we thought that videoing would be off-putting for the group and facial expressions weren't so important to record. - we could also upload the audio recording straight to Soundcloud.