Discover Electronic Dance Music (EDM) concerts and music festivals
Fans of Electronic Dance Music (EDM) often miss out on relevant concerts and music festivals in North America: once they become aware, it’s too late or expensive to attend.
Music festivals and concerts are on the rise worldwide, as the world starts recovering from the Covid-19 pandemic. Becoming aware of events is still a challenge, though. In special for fans of Electronic Dance Music (EDM): 83% of respondents to an online survey we conducted (25 respondents) have reported that social media is their main tool for discovering relevant events and concerts. That process is demanding and time-consuming.
As venues start reopening fully with fewer restrictions and artists doing more tours, starting to develop such a website now would be great timing. With over decades of no changes in how friends, family, and even music-goers go about finding music festivals, and concerts, the time has come to bring the festivals and concerts to them.
Through both primary and secondary user research, we found 3 main user pain points.
User Pain Points:
User Feedback:
Our preliminary user research validates the problem of accessibility and discoverability of events, specifically music festival, and concerts. We learned that:
To increase the discoverability of EDM music festivals and concerts, Festa is an entertainment aggregator that allows them to find events to attend. Unlike a Google search, Festa recommends events for EDM fans in North America to attend, based on their location and favorite artists. This will give users more time to plan for the event and decrease the time searching for their next music experience.
After we showcased our prototype to the users again, we learned that:
Main Design Changes:
This project was implemented using Typescript which is a superscript of JavaScript. TypeScript ensures an implicit checking of implementation which makes it less prone to error. On the backend side of the project.
Where is it hosted?
The backend API is hosted on Heroku, While the frontend is hosted on Vercel.
What is your tech stack?
Programming Language: JavaScript (TypeScript) and React on the frontend.
Database: MongoDB and Mongoose -Object Document Mapping (ODM).
Microservices: Separating user, admin, and notification services for scalability.
Bullmq: A queueing technique used for sending data asynchronously through different services without no delay if any of the servers of the services is down.
What was the hardest part of development?
The critical thinking of how the data structure will be built on the API level end.
Does your app have any scaling issues?
It might eventually have based on the data sending or receiving but we can incorporate Redis which is an in-memory database in the form key-value pair and helps to keep data in the cache which retrieve later for faster responses.
Although we will not be continuing the development of Festa after Colab, we learned how to manage product development within a short period of time with the resources available to us.
I have learned a lot through this experience on what it means to be not only an effective PM but what it means to find the right problem to solve. Working closely with a designer and multiple developers to make your vision a reality is extremely rewarding. From concept, mockups, and customer and competitive research, to a fully working product is a huge personal accomplishment.
I learned that good design comes from extensive user research to fully understand the user’s pain points and needs. By putting most of our efforts into user research, and defining and identifying a feasible problem space, I was able to design a product that aligns with the product manager’s vision and is feasible to build by the developers.
We learned the importance of communication and accountability while working in a team both asynchronously and synchronously to design and build a product. Despite not being able to fully complete the development of Festa, as a team we can see our growth and progress made since the beginning of this cohort.