Legato Livestreaming Platform
Platform for musicians to host live-streamed events to a global audience
Live music became globally inaccessible during the pandemic. Musicians, whose livelihoods depended on access to their audience, needed a way to safely continue to perform. Musicians did not have access to the typical way of booking gigs during this time. They needed a way to create their own events—deciding for themselves the venue, time, date, and ticket price.
As time went on, the Legato model incrementally shifted from being a purely DIY/self-starter platform for musicians, to serving as a "virtual venue" for the performances, where artists would get an upfront fee to have an event on Legato, and Legato would retain the income from the ticket costs. This was a shift from the original model where musicians would retain 100% of their ticket price.
As the design evolved, there were two key areas that needed attention while also managing client/stakeholder desires.
Audience
The Legato stakeholders came to us initially with fairly set directives and ideas of how things "should" work. It was an involved process trying to work in flow improvements to better suit the two audiences Legato was attempting to reach: Ticket Buyers and Musicians
Strategy
The platform is continuing to evolve and is being updated regularly to accommodate shifting market needs. What started as a mainly U.S.-focused platform has turned into a much more globally focused platform, with artists coming from across Europe and South America.
Homepage evolution: Audience
The original Legato is almost unrecognizable to the current Legato, as the strategy, audience, and stakeholder goals shifted drastically.
The original primary audience directive was classical musicians looking to put on their own "concert from home." The homepage was seen as a place where musicians could sign up to put on shows, but was otherwise considered secondary. The stakeholders' expectation was that artists would be sending their fans to their event page directly, rather than through the homepage.
The team was gradually able to shift the stakeholders' perceived primary audience from the performers to the people purchasing tickets for artists they care about, which is reflected in the way the homepage has evolved. The homepage is now seen as more of a venue and a destination, with a more engaging look that puts the artists front and center in a way that is appealing to fans.
Login evolution: Audience
With the way Legato is built, there are separate logins for musicians and ticket buyers. The ticket purchasing and live-streaming is handled by a third party; the musician user management and event creation is handled by Legato.
The artist sign-up and login was thought of as the primary action of the site and was situated top right of the interface. Clicking the artist login would lead to a login/sign up page. In order to buy a ticket, users would have to go to the event page and click the 'Buy Ticket' button, then create an account (through the third party service), and then buy the ticket.
This confusion increased when ticket buyers who come back to Legato prior to the show found themselves logged out of the third party service. They would try to log in using the 'artist login' button, assuming it was the one they previously used. This led to lots of artist accounts being accidentally created and ticket buyers missing shows.
The solution was a discussion with the stakeholders that went hand-in-hand with shifting the perceived primary audience (as reflected in the Homepage Evolution). The discussion focused on who needed to be targeted with the interface. Our team proposed a fix that involved 1) Removing the artist login/sign up from the top right and putting it in the footer, 2) Bringing the ticket buyer login into that primary spot and making sure it's on all pages, not just the event page, and 3) Updating the sign up form for artists to be multi-step and multi-page, so anyone who unintentionally gets to that sign up page is significantly less likely to follow through.
Since these updates were implemented, admins have had to remove no unintentionally created musician accounts and no further emails regarding missed shows/login confusion have been received.
Feature highlight: Featured event carousel
It was important that the carousel transitions were more exciting than a classic fade or slide given that conversion rates on carousels are usually low. This was an important feature for the marketing team when promoting shows. Admin users are able to go into the dashboard and select up to five events to feature.
Feature highlight: Event status indicators
