NPR Tiny Desk Concerts
Music Discovery Experience Design
Taking a fun &
memorable approach to
music discovery
Tiny Desk Concerts is a video series of concerts hosted at the NPR Music headquarters. With the goal of exposing listeners to new artists, NPR Tiny Desk showcases musicians' talents through authentic live performances.
Team
Ethan Allwood
Max Chen
Jeff Orsino
Bharathi Kiran Sonea
Clark Tanquerido
Context
This project was created over 7 weeks for an Experience Design class. We were tasked with identifying a design opportunity for an existing company, and develop a digital solution using experience design that could provide real value for the company.
The Problem
With over 1100 recorded concerts living unfiltered on NPR's YouTube channel and website, Tiny Desk fans have little reason to engage with concerts from artists they aren't familiar with, losing out on much of the value Tiny Desk has to offer.
Seeking a Solution
How might we create an engaging experience for listeners to more easily explore the expansive Tiny Desk catalogue and discover new music?
Driving traffic through mobile-first design
Tiny Desk's videos are mostly viewed on YouTube, and with YouTube's traffic being over 87% on mobile, we focused our efforts on redirecting the audience to a mobile web experience.
How do we classify music to help audiences seek artists they will like?
We researched many forms of music classification and landed on Mood as our primary method. While systems like genre are well known and widely used, many artists are tough to classify and with Tiny Desk's unique style of raw intimate performances, some artists' concerts may even fall outside of their usual genre style. Mood worked as a more universal descriptor that can help people understand what experience they might get from a concert.
Bridging the physical experience
As a video series that is so strongly linked to the physical space the artists perform in, we wanted to create a digital experience that could relate to a physical form of music discovery by simulating crate digging for vinyl records.
This section is under construction. More coming soon :)
For now, these can be viewed in the scenario video above.
Colour
Our triadic colour scheme retains NPR's brand identity while creating a fun yet harmonious segregation of content by highlighting interactive links and areas of the illustrations.
Illustrations
Tiny Desk's existing visual identity is largely tied to the physical spaces, using the illustration of the mic, so we leaned into this existing style, with our team member Max creating new illustrations to represent each section on the artist pages.
Misregistration
Misregistration of the colour adds visual interest to images while extending the essence of tiny desk concerts into the visual identity; highlighting imperfection.
“If we can turn people on to someone they've never heard, that's always been - in my 35 years at NPR - that has totally been my goal.”
- Bob Boilen, Creator of NPR Tiny Desk Concerts
The goal of Tiny Desk since its creation has always been to highlight great music and introduce audiences to new favourites. With a constantly expanding catalogue of concerts, and no way to filter through it, the current website fails to reach Tiny Desk's full potential of being a music discovery platform.
Much of NPR's funding comes through donations, so the best way to provide value to the company is by providing value to the users, giving them more reason to want to support it. By helping the website better fulfill Tiny Desk's main purpose for existing, the promotion and discovery of artists, we can provide more value for listeners, allowing them to continue discovering great new music using the artists they already know and love as a starting point.
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