When artists join un:hurd, they often have at least a small social media following and have started uploading their songs to Spotify. In order to give them a more professional way to present themselves to the world, un:hurd music wanted to introduce the fan hub into the suite of products they offer. The fan-hub is a micro-website that acts as a centralised place for an artist’s fans to find information on their newest releases, upcoming tours, their community platforms and to join their mailing lists.
I researched a series of micro-websites that were all limited to one page. While looking at our direct competitors, the vast majority of these micro-websites just used one long scroll. As a result, they all look very similar and none stood out. When I researched micro-websites that did it well, I liked the concept of it functioning more like a slide show, showing one piece of important information at a time, reducing cognitive load on the user.
Before I proceeded with one idea, I put together some low-fi wireframes of a dashboard-style fan hub page in keeping with the styling I used on un:hurd’s web app, and also a slideshow style and shared these with stakeholders. They also preferred the more unique slideshow style idea. After the slideshow direction had been approved, I created low-fi wireframes for mobile to test the soundness of concept across different breakpoints before moving onto high-fi.
un:hurd music is a genre agnostic app. To honour this I wanted to make sure the fan hub would represent artists across the genre spectrum. To do so, it was necessary for artists to have some control over the aesthetic of their site. After ensuring the project scope allowed me to offer artists background choice, I chose 6 patterned and 6 solid colour backgrounds. I split these into light and dark, and created a light and dark mode set of styling for the slides to ensure legibility in both scenarios.
After creating the designs for the fan hub, I then needed to create the flow for artists to input the information to build their fan hub. As the fan hub can contain a lot of artist information, the resultant user flow is quite long. As we revisit the fan hub in the future and move forward from an MVP product, we will aim to significantly reduce this.
I am on a mission to slowly breathe more life into un:hurd through the use of animation. Currently, the product is quite static; however we wanted a way to show users what the fan hub feature was, and a glimpse of the processes they’d need to complete to create it, before they entered the flow with the aim to reduce drop off. I created a feature walkthrough animation with LottieLabs and this is now integrated in both our iOS and Web app.
Artists can choose between a range of different backgrounds, here’s a small showcase of what those different backgrounds look like in action.
