Virtual MidWay Music Festival + Summit
The Festival From Your Couch
Product Vision + Strategy
Market + User Research
Journey Mapping
QA Testing
Experience Design
Roadmapping
Brand Building
GTM Strategy
In response to the pandemic and social distancing orders, our team decided to alter our typically in-person music festival to fit a digital space. We built a 7-day, cross-platform virtual festival experience featuring 50+ music professionals and a react native mobile application with a 20% adoption rate.
ROLE
Founder, Director of Experience + Innovation
Product Strategist + Designer
TEAM
Product Strategist + Designer
2 Developers
Stream Managers
Marketers
TIMELINE
1 year
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, our team pivoted our 3-day in-person music festival into a 7-day digital experience. Through in-depth market and user research, I identified key challenges of virtual events - audience fatigue/overwhelm, lack of engagement, and technological barriers - and balanced them with audience behaviors during quarantine. This informed an experience strategy that overcame these obstacles, resulting in an engaging, community-driven experience.
KEY RESULTS
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50+ artists and music industry professionals streaming from across the USA
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500+ virtual tickets sold
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20% adoption rate for mobile application
The Schedule
This year's festival (2021) was heavily influenced by COVID-19 and the affects of the pandemic on audience-members.
DAILY SCHEDULE
MORNINGS: Kick off the Day with MidWay
Each morning ticket-holders were invited to participate in exercise and meditation workshops, streamed via MidWay's private YouTube link.
AFTERNOONS: Panel Discussions
We curated a lunch time panel series where music professionals got together to discuss hot topics in the industry. Panelist's were featured from: Secretly Publishing, Secretly Group, WestLake Studios, Live Nation, Omnian Music Group, La La Land and more. Streamed on VEEPS.
EVENINGS: Live-streamed music and Artist Q&A's
We closed each day with a live-streamed show, featuring 2-4 artists from across the country. Streamed on VEEPS.
ALWAYS: MidWay Artist Takeovers
As a booth free programming to non-ticket-holders and as a guerilla marketing tactic, select artists took over MidWay's social stories (Instagram and Facebook) for the entire week. Content included: intros, announcing a new release, behind-the-scenes of their MidWay set and more.
Mobile Application
Virtual events were so foreign to our attendees; to ease the stress of uncertainty, I designed and launched a mobile application that condensed the virtual festival into an easily accessible and intuitive experience.
KEY FEATURES
Explore the lineup and save your favorites.
Built with artist discovery in mind, the user is able to seamlessly navigate through the lineup and discover artists they haven't listened to before through easy-access images and links to their music. If the user is intrigued and wants to see the artist's set, select the heart icon to begin to build their own personalized lineup schedule.
View and edit your personalized festival schedule.
User's won't miss any of their favorite acts with easy access to their heart-ed lineup through the My Festival tab. Here, users can view and edit their selected lineup, learn more about the artists, and check the artist set times.
View the festival schedule like you were in person.
"View by venue" allows users to view full show schedules while also creating a sense of normalsy and familiarity for them. This feature lets them visualize how the festival would have been laid out if in person by highlighting the local venues.
Hot-topic questions, answered.
To cover our bases, we added a FAQ section to assist users in understanding how the festival would work, brainstorming ideas for how to bring the festival home, and answer other hot-topic questions.
"[Alexi] provided clear requirements for the application...[She designed] a straightforward user experience that augmented the experience of festival attendees. She was receptive to feedback and adapted her design quickly when features couldn't be achieved given the time constraints."
Jordan Gaeta
Former Software Developer at MidWay
"I felt like I was a part of something even though [the festival] wasn't in person."
Anonymous Review
in Apple App store
