CloudForge Marketplace

who

SoFar Sounds is reimagining the live event experience through curated, intimate performances in 325 cities around the world. They are a community of thousands of artists, hosts, fans, travelers and more, putting on hundreds of secret, intimate events per month, across the world.

Daily I work with a UX manager and product, business, and technology partners to ensure shared understanding of business and user goals. I gain stakeholder support for designs by clearly communicating design vision and rationale, while also ensuring deliverables happen on time and on budget.

the ask

Support SoFar’s admin/ops team - I was tasked with revising the tooling to reflect their new centralized approach to event booking. All tools are designed to facilitate booking decisions and event management given this new organization and varying context of the users that had previously used Google sheets (see figure 2 as an example).

I was in charge of the Artist Directory.

This is a comprehensive, city agnostic tool for understanding the SoFar world of artists, designed to make booking decisions easier. This tool will eventually be combined with a venue database that will lead to an entire platform to help automate the booking process for operations.

Defining MVP

1. Enable artist bookers to book an artist they’ve never met without needing to talk to another Staff member. 

2. Keep all the existing functionality of the current database.

3. Consolidate the remaining external Google Sheets and artist portal features used to make artist booking decisions.

Tools & Process

We work very lean, using Agile Scrum. The primary tools used are Figma for prototyping, Slack and Jira for project management, and Google for documentation.

There’s also constant collaboration, transparency with developers, online workshops with stickies, bi-weekly walk throughs, etc.

Obstacles

New tool – I had not used Figma to this level before.

Remote team – On-boarding with a remote team served new challenges.

Developer pushback – Constraints arose and through collaboration we were able to create workarounds.

Prototype

The outcome of the work is three functional Figma prototypes and a design system.