Project Brief
SASSAS is an arts nonprofit based in Los Angeles that seeks to bring experimental music to the city and provide opportunities for experimental musicians and artists to make work in unique venues. They are in their 15th year and needed to bring their current site into the modern era. The site had been built by the SASSAS team in various stages, and as a result was sprawling, confusing and difficult to use. The team had experience with WordPress and wanted to rebuild using it as a platform. Their goal was to create a space that could house their archived events, generate new interest and drive membership in the organization.
The final site is viewable at: http://sassas.org
Intended Audience
The project was built with three groups in mind:
- SASSAS Stakeholders
The board and core team of employees that make up SASSAS was deeply important to the use of the site as they would be bringing a decade and a half of data and material on to the new site, and would be the primary guides around what sort of data existed. - SASSAS Fans
As an active part of the Los Angeles arts scene, SASSAS had an active member base, as well as a large group of participating artists and musicians that had performed and contributed to SASSAS programs. A key subset of these SASSAS fans were the ‘members’ that provided the financial backbone for SASSAS’ programs. - Experimental Music Fans
A largely unknown part of the SASSAS ecosystem. The list of artists that have taken part in SASSAS work makes them a goto for anyone dabbling in experimental music. Due to a lack of data analytics, and a lack of resources to do research SASSAS had no firm sense of how well known, or depended upon they were by the experimental music scene at large. They had an unwavering sense that their potential to grow this audience was vast.
Key Issues
There were two primary areas of concern as I began to dig into the SASSAS redesign. The first was fairly straightforward; a simple, efficient and flexible way to add the archival and future events to the site. The second was more subtle and complex. As I worked with the SASSAS team on defining the information architecture for the site it became clear that it was difficult for them to consider the needs of external users; SASSAS operated, primarily, based on internal, longstanding assumptions. Some examples of these are:
- SASSAS programs required no explanation beyond the program name
- Users would only need the names of performers to feel compelled to explore the site
- Internal program purposes (fundraising events vs. standard events) trumped the audience experience of these events (a concert!)
It became a primary goal during the project to continue to push against these assumptions to create a less intimidating, inviting site.
My Approach
Content entry was largely handled by the existing tools within the WordPress platform. I created a streamlined data entry form that reflected the frontend presentation of each event, to allow the SASSAS team to feel that there was a logic to the data they were entering.
/im
I created two separate content types: events and locations to allow for reuse of location across events (a common occurrence in the past) and to ensure that we would be able to create a path through the SASSAS data based on location. My intention was to allow users who were familiar with the Los Angeles architectural landmarks SASSAS had hosted events at to be drawn on to the SASSAS site and how the group had transformed and reimagined the space.
The front end presentation of the events made sure to tie each event to it’s program and give a sense of cohesion to users that were unfamiliar with SASSAS. All events shared the same page structure and color scheme, but the program, and intention of the program, was kept consistent from single event to program page.
As I worked on creating the paths that users would take through the site, and the methods that SASSAS used to group like events I arrived at a solution to the obscure and, I felt, frustratingly opaque entry into the world of SASSAS. As a group that is dedicated to breaking convention, confounding expectations and generally loosening their audiences ties to the expected they did little to pave the way for the pure novice. I was concerned that we would have incredible rates of oneoff visitors without trying to address this. My proposal to SASSAS was to add two additional taxonomies to their events: genres and instruments. These were the two vectors that anyone who had even a passing relationship with music could understand. SASSAS was (and is) hesitant to use these as they fear that they may be limiting the event by using these terms. After some long discussions–and deciding to only present them with a disclaimer–we agreed to use these terms as the focal point on the archive search page.
I am confident that as they get further analytics and user feedback we can utilize these terms to provide inviting points of entry across the entire site, creating a far more involved online audience.