Increasing equity and inclusion in music education with app content design

Problem‍

Online audition system for Stanford Jazz Workshop excluded students from underserved communities due to housing, bandwidth, and lack of services.

Solution‍

Create a browser-based app that can be accessed from public devices via cell data, and eliminates user friction.

Results‍

SJW Placement Evaluation Player eliminated support tickets, increased submissions from underserved communities, and led to confident submissions from first-time users.

My roles

• UX research lead
• Content design
• Project management

Initial user research

We found enrollment data for 2021 and 2022 lacked submissions from schools in underserved communities.

Initial research identified barriers, including the fact that in underserved communities in our service area, many students:

• Had no computers or Internet service
• Lived in small apartments with several families
• Had no place where they could play their instruments at home

Our audition system was excluding all of these students.

To reach them, we decided to create a new audition system with the following technical goals:

• Accessible from any device using only cellular data
• Browser-based, no installation required
• Eliminate user friction due to difficulty in use

In addition, I surveyed users of our existing system, who revealed these pain points:

• Files took too much time to download
• Making a five-minute audition took as long as two hours
• Instructions and materials on separate screens was frustrating
• Too many options for audition material

Prototyping and testing

We tested several approaches to Web-based systems, including:

• A third-party browser-based multitrack mixer to control volume
• Video synced with audio on Soundslice
• A proprietary browser-based MP3 player

In our tests, the browser-based MP3 player took the least amount of time to load and had the simplest UI. It also gave us the most control over its design and content.

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For the design phase, I did the following:

• Created lo-fi wireframes in Adobe XD
• Performed user testing of the wireframes with ten participants and their families
• Refined microcopy and UI, created hi-fi prototypes, and did additional user testing
• Performed usability testing, then deployed

Initial deployment results

Initially, the results seemed fantastic:

• Students played much more expressively
• We had no complaints about load time or time required to complete the audition

But we still had a large number of support calls. I surveyed users who needed support, and they were all beginning improvisers and first-time users. Our original usability testing group was too narrow, focusing on experienced users.

The first-time user interviews brought up additional pain points:

• No guidance on which song to select
• No instructions on how to improvise
• No scaffolding for those who cannot improvise

Final release and results

Based on these survey results, we:

• Redesigned the UI
• Streamlined the user flow
• Created new content to guide first-time users
• Created a new hi-fi prototype, and tested it with first-time users

This time, it seemed to offer a frictionless experience from end-to-end. We renamed and deployed it as the Placement Evaluation Player app for our 2023 enrollment period, with these results:
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• Support calls reduced to zero
• Auditions from first-time users — including students from  districts in underserved communities — were confident and clear

The Placement Evaluation Player successfully increased equity and inclusion in program enrollment, with a more user-friendly and accessible audition process.

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