Insomniac Redesign

Insomniac is one of the leading electronic dance music promoters, being the organizers of notable record labels, clubs, and festivals across the US. With the growth of their productions exceeding 500+ events a year, inevitably comes the creation of the Insomniac app. Rather than scrolling endlessly through Insomniac’s social media platforms to find important event details, this app greatly helped their customers find relevant information to events they’re attending–including set times, parking, and festival maps.

When attending a music festival, especially those that are 2 or 3 days long, planning a trip can already be overwhelming from booking accommodations, transportation, and scheduling. When it comes to planning a setlist of artists you want to see with friends, a lot of compromise and coordination is involved due to differing music tastes between friends or time conflicts. Insomniac’s app does have basic functionality to filter and share your own setlist, but in this project I wanted to investigate how I can further expand on their product through my own experiences as a regular attendee of their events.

Before brainstorming UI designs, I conducted interviews with other users of the Insomniac app to first see if my struggles were validated by others, and second to learn about their own personal experiences with the app.

As I worked on this redesign, I made sure to focus on these three main goals derived from my research findings and from my own experiences and struggles as a regular user of their app.

When it comes to brainstorming how I would redesign the entire process of a collaborative setlist feature, an initial idea I had was being able to have in-app chat messaging to discuss their setlists. But I had to take a step back and think about it from a technical and business standpoint. Realistically, creating a function like that requires real-time databases and servers to send and receive messages instantaneously, which costs a lot of resources that the business may not decide to invest in. From a user standpoint, I can also see people opt out of using the chat system entirely just because they already have established group chats over text, so why chat on another app?

So I looked to Spotify Jam and Elfster, two very unexpected services that I drew inspiration from! Both services allow users to send their friends a unique link to join their jam session or gift exchange. Elfster goes one step further to support sending invites to friends in-app and archives old gift exchange onto the user’s profile.
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Setting up my design using this type of back-end technology is more plausible from a business and consumer standpoint. Insomniac already has an existing infrastructure and framework to implement link sharing, and it’s sure to be utilized more by users, compared to in-app messaging.

With this new plan, I mapped a UX journey flow that depicts a scenario where a user creates a setlist of artists they want to see and shares it with their friends to coordinate their plans.

The app’s sole purpose for the past 5 years has been to provide information, and that’s reflective of the home page—it’s an overwhelmingly long list of upcoming events. Insomniac has been trying to add more personalized touches, like Collectibles (digital pins that can be collected at an event) and Wristbands (a gallery collection of past event wristbands), but despite their efforts, I found that none of my interviewees have used it or find it enticing.

So with that being said—following the 2nd and 3rd goal of my redesign—I will also be designing completely new pages to make the UI more personalized and user-centered. By formatting some elements that are similar to other social media apps that people already know and love, my hope is to 1) improve the app so it's easier to operate when users are actually at the festival and 2) compel users to enjoy the cool features that Insomniac has already worked hard to implement. 

Using Sketch, I created cleaner wireframes of just the new personalized pages and collaborative setlist feature. The rest of the app will essentially stay the same.

After weeks of prototyping and iteration, the final prototype is done! You can interact with the prototype on Figma here. Remember the goals I laid out for myself in the beginning of the project? Here they are again, and how I accomplished them!

Compared to its competitors, Insomniac is the only company that has their own dedicated app, though that may be due to the size of their company and ability to host hundreds of productions. Nonetheless, their loyal community and customer base solidify their dominance in the market.

‍Being that the app currently just shares event information, it is a bit one dimensional overall. With these UX changes I believe the app can be transformed into a first of its class experience that not only delivers essential company to user information in a more effective manner, but also offers a personalized and interactive EDM platform for user to user connection.

This redesign was my first solo UX project and I’m really happy with the way it turned out! There are pros working with a team, but I also learned valuable skills going solo. It’s difficult to find the motivation and time to work on this personal project outside of my full time job, so this experience really helped me refine my prioritization and time management skills (that I previously thought were already strong). But on the flip side since I was working solo, I had the luxury to spend as much time as I wanted making my prototype pixel perfect and learning more advanced Figma functions that I didn't know before.

This project also really challenged me to design within business constraints. I was so close to choosing the in-app messaging feature to solve the problem statement, however after sleeping on it for a couple days, I just knew it wouldn’t be feasible or used by Insomniac in real life. I constantly needed to remember to stay within business constraints, technology, budget, and the app’s original purpose. Instead of designing new features, I focused on purely enhancing and improving what they currently have laid out. 

This project reinforces the importance of a user-centered design approach when designing digital products. Through research, I realized that a deep understanding of what user’s need and how they behave is essential to designing engaging and intuitive solutions that genuinely provide value to their lives.