This week, we began to ideate solutions and prepared for mid-semester review. We looked over the DJ’s survey responses in open studio and from there, we brainstormed possible concepts to move forward with. From the survey we gained important key insights.

 

• Almost all community DJ’s, all Rice faculty, and half of the student DJ’s felt very comfortable using and handling vinyl
• Roughly 40% of all DJ’s do not play vinyl throughout their set, while the rest play anywhere from 1-30 vinyl per shift
• Some DJ’s have their own vinyl
• There is not good handling of the vinyl equipment in terms of cleanliness and sleeves.
  • Many of the vinyl sleeves are torn up and illegible
  • The lack of maintenance with the turntables prevents DJ’s from playing their vinyl

 

These insights made us reevaluate our user persona and made us realize that there are two different users in our problem space. The first user is the one we initially had—a new DJ who doesn’t know how to play vinyl and is afraid of damaging the vinyl and creating dead air. This persona fits in with half of the student DJ’s. The other persona is someone that is comfortable with playing vinyl but chooses not to because they struggle to locate music of their taste or do not want to get their personal vinyl dirty. With these responses in mind we began to ideate.

 

Each of us in open studio jotted our ideas on sticky notes and then categorized similar ideas together. The biggest issue we wanted to tackle was changing/improving the training process and finding a way to make it a refresher to people. For the DJ’s that already know how to play, we considered solutions that tell them why vinyl’s matter and that incentives DJ’s to play with a reward system.

 

In our team meeting, we narrowed down our ideas in preparation for the mid-semester review. Based on our how can we statement, we decided that the most important issue to tackle was the vinyl training system. Our idea is to implement a training tool that addresses the use of vinyl during the DJ shift and how to properly handle/care for vinyl. This would act as a refresher that would review current DJ’s knowledge. In addition, we hope to improve the current training process by increasing hands on training experience, orienting the DJ’s to the vinyl room, and utilizes an experienced DJ the trainer. Given the opportunity, we would implement a solution that addresses the organization system.

 

Our next steps are to narrow down and scope ideas from ideate, create a low-fidelity prototype, test the low-fidelity prototype with users, and iterate build/test cycle until the high-fidelity prototype is developed. We will test our prototype by sending out a survey in the middle term to see if all DJ’s are fully comfortable with playing and caring for vinyl. In the long term, we will send out a final survey to see if they are playing vinyl at least 25% of the time.