Stakeholder and Patron Interviews
User Personas
User Flows
Information Architecture
Content Workshop
PatronManager (SaleForce) Integration
Site Mapping
Wireframing
UI Styling
Prototyping
Passim is a historic folk music club that’s been a staple of Harvard Square for over 50 years. They’ve hosted greats such as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez and have launched the careers of recent standouts like Lake Street Dive and Margaret Glaspy.
They came to us looking to redesign their website. They were planning on moving on to a new ticketing platform and wanted a refreshed site to go along with it. Their current site was was burdened by a number of problems that needed serious fixing: it wasn’t responsive, the ticketing platform was just bolted on, and many member privileges perks like free tickets could only be redeemed by calling the club from 9-5.
Interviews and Discoveries
A filtering system allows guests to find shows in their price range (including free!) as well as search by genre.
I began by interviewing a number of key stakeholders (Executive Director, Managing Director, Assistant Club Manager, Membership Director) as well as a number of board members, long-time patrons, and those that were at their first Passim show. What became clear was that people who are regulars see the club in a completely different way than those on the outside.
Passim is unlike almost any other club space; It’s a small, intimate listening room where patrons sit and take in a show with full attention on the performers. Many new patrons didn’t know what to make of the place and certainly didn’t know about its history, outreach, school, or even that it’s a non-profit. To address this, I pared back the navigation to highlight their music offerings, their classes, the mission, and to give users a quick way to join and donate.
Passim prides itself on providing dozens of free shows around Cambridge throughout the year. However, on the site these free shows were in a completely different part of the site than the ticketed club show. This was solved by running all shows into one event calendar, allowing them to highlight the number of free shows they offer, as well as put them in the same league as the club shows.
Simplified navigation puts an emphasis on the primary aspects of Passim: live performances and music instruction.
Most of these free shows are a part of a series of shows that takes place at number of venues across the city. Previously, all the venues and all the schedules were housed on one page, making it difficult for a user to find out more about each series. In the redesign, I put each series on its own page and included links to other series to make it easy for a user exploring free shows to find even more.
Lastly, to address the number of users who’d never been to Passim, I created an “Experience Passim” page to house a brief video about the club and its performances as well as testimonials from patrons ranging in age from their typical 40-60 demo to a younger 20-something crowd that they program for to build a patron base.
This project was completed at Image Conscious Studios.