Estuardo Salazar - Mind-Link

What is Mind-Link?

During ing my cohort at Wyncode Academy, we worked in teams to develop two shippable products. I had the opportunity to work on a personal idea for one project, but for Mind-Link, I had to work on my partner's idea. Initially, I didn't see the need for a product like Mind-Link and found it challenging to design something I believed didn't fill a gap in the music industry. As a professional with many years of experience in the industry, I viewed Mind-Link as a narcissistic idea, existing mainly due to one person's passion for music.

Despite my reservations, I embraced the challenge and trusted the process. Through iterative feedback and collaboration, the product began to take shape, guiding us in its development. Thanks to our team's sportsmanship, patience, and adherence to the steps provided in class, Mind-Link became one of the most solid projects across all cohorts. It excelled in design, functionality, accessibility, and features.

In the end, Mind-Link proved to be a platform where artists can showcase their catalogs both sonically and visually, free from the distractions of friend requests, random stories, reels, boomerangs, or fake news. I'm very happy with the results and proud of what we achieved.

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The Problem?

The lack of a music-based platform that caters to artist rather than the consumer.

Many social media platforms require the user to watch numerous adds before showing content and many prohibit the user from leaving the website if an artist wants to share a third party link.

The Team

Mind-Link was designed during the pandemic of 2020 and our field research was limited to desk research only - but it was a lot of fun! Everyday we learned from each other's creation process and every night it was a blast to work and jam over a period of sleepless zoom nights.

Where we started

We started by following a problem solving framework that provided us with guidance all the way from the beginning to the end of the process. (actually it never ends..)

1. Learn

Things we learned during our research

Competitive Audit

We did extensive research based on the most used music-based platforms used by artists and this is what we found:

Surveys

We also sent out our survey to all our artist friends and family.

2. Define

Users

Just like the Uber case, we have two types of users, Artist and Listeners.

Who is our User?

Now that we defined our users and the site map, we were able to focus on the the main needs of those Users. Meet Ozzy Hendrix our main user persona inspired by own self experiences as music producers and performing artists.

What does our user need?

Ozzy Hendrix needs a social media platform that functions as a hub to link all his social media, with a built in media player to showcase his work in high definition without the noise of friend requests or advertising in order to generate more views.

Often musicians measure their success by the amount of music being played, liked, or shared. The reach an artist has is key to their survival.

User Flows & Sitemap

The first thing we designed was a quick Low Definition user flow to help us visualize the concept - this was a fundamental stone in our design process.