We were told to design an independent artist ("indie") version of an online music store. This meant figuring out the target audience, creating personae, scenarios, task analyses, site maps, wireframes, and eventually a visual treatment of the front page.
One of the primary differences that I believe this store has from the iTunes Music Store is that community would be central. iTunes Music Store very strictly controls community involvement with iMixes being the only way people can really communicate with one another. An indie store, however, would require community involvement to properly function. The target audience simply wouldn't put up with anything else. These means something more akin to Amazon.com in content—but with contributions from the artists as well. One of my primary user groups regularly checks things like liner notes to find new music. We can have the artists directly contributing that information to our users.
This lead to the development of features like "The Mainstream Listeners' Guide". Based upon information collected from user purchases, user recommendations, and artist recommendations, users can tell the store which "mainstream" bands they like and the store will present indie bands it thinks the user might like. Several internet radio streams would also be central to the discovery of "new" music. iTunes Music Store can rely on the record labels to push the music. The popular music automatically percolates to the top. Indie listeners don't always want the most popular—some even strive for the least popular. Artists would be welcome contributors to the site. There would be separate sections for "reviews" and "comments". Both would be site-moderated, but the reviews would be more formalized reviews of the album, artist, or label. The comments would be free-form discussion board-style comments.
I've selected a few of the pieces for display on this page. First is the site map.
And now a wireframe for search results:
Wireframe for an album information page:
Here are three visual treatments for the front page. Not exactly my best work as far as color choices go. Unfortunately we had to make the visual treatment for the front page only, and mine looks rather similar to iTunes Music Store here.
