Northern Lights Chorale:

Creating a UX Strategy

Background

The Northern Lights Chorale approached the UX Design team at Prime to have us develop a UX Strategy for them. They have several goals they aim to achieve by changing their UX Strategy.

NLC wants to increase their visibility and expanding their audience, specifically focusing on the under-55 demographic that is currently underrepresented. Northern Lights Chorale is a nonprofit that runs entirely on donations, and they have recently had to start paying their director, so they were also focused on boosting their donations to help cover these new costs.

The goal for users is to make sure that they feel welcome at a chorale concert, and feel engaged in the fine arts community in the Twin Cities. Building off this, users should feel inclined to donate because they’re confident their donations will be crucial to supporting the NLC.

Methods and Deliverables

  • Touchpoint strategy map

  • User engagement strategy

  • Secondary research

  • Figma prototyping

Strategy Plan

My team developed a Strategy Plan to help guide us throughout the project and keep these goals in mind:

All user experience touch-points for Northern Lights Chorale will help younger concertgoers and donors to feel welcome and engaged in the fine arts community. They will be able to easily find concerts to attend, and be more inclined to give back to the community by donating.

We will do this by focusing on improving their current interaction points and social medias to provide users with clearer information and content to engage and attract younger audiences.

We will also encourage audience members to give back by highlighting the impact their donations will have - whether that’s supporting the fine arts by allowing the chorale to buy new music, or getting advertising for their company.

Client Intake and Secondary Research

Part of client intake was taking stock of all of the user touchpoints the organization has currently. The team assessed this and build a touchpoint map of all of the places that users can interact with the NLC. We then determined which parts of each phase could either be improved on, and which phases had room for entirely new touchpoints.

This process sparked a lot of questions for us, and we used those questions to guide our research and help back up our strategy.

We found the answers to questions such as:

  • How do you market to Millienial and Gen Z audiences?

  • How much does it cost to boost posts on social media?

  • What are other choirs in the area doing to raise money?

  • What kinds of young people are already listening to choral or classical music?

And when we came together to discuss our findings, we had a better handle on what strategies might work best for the NLC and their budget, and which strategies would be most effective in targeting the audience groups they want to get more of.

Touchpoint Strategy Map

After research and discussion, we reviewed what the NLC currently does, and then created a touchpoint strategy map that incorporated our new ideas. The result is the map on the right, which starts in the Attract phase, but should ideally loop around as users are retained.

The biggest touchpoints we added were:

  • Attract: Instagram and TikTok content

  • Engage: Website improvements and SEO

  • Attend: enhanced concert experience, and a tiptap pay stand

  • Retain: improved donation page on their website, improved social medias to follow

All of these suggestions were made keeping the user goals in mind - the changes are meant to help better connect the users to NLC so that they can engage and learn more, appreciate the concerts they attend, and hopefully feel inclined to donate and then see how their donations impact the NLC.

Prototyping

The team then divided and conquered to build out what each new or changed touchpoint would look like. We broke it up by phases, and I tackled the Engage and Retain phases, focusing on changes to the client’s website.

The changes made to the current site focus on improving the user experience during the Engage and Retain phases of the user’s journey. Many of the changes also center around general improvements to the site architecture and making it simpler.

Changes such as making the social media links more obvious, clarifying the language around donations, and giving the concerts page its own place in the navigation bar will achieve the user goals by making it easier to connect with the chorale and learn where to attend concerts. It will make donating more straightforward, and help them feel more connected to the chorale even after the concerts, as they learn what the donations are used for. There will also be more information on what sponsorship levels will get them.

I’ve also included the full Figma file with annotations on the left.

Video Walkthrough

The client received a full folder of suggestions they can use to develop their UX Strategy, at all stages of the user journey. My team created a video to walkthrough of all those materials, which you can view on the right.

What I Learned and Next Steps

Going forward, the NLC should be able to adopt some of these suggested changes. The team at NLC is all volunteers, but they are a dedicated group who should be able to take some of our input and strategically enhance their users’ experience to better achieve their goals. Most of the suggested updates were surrounding their website and social medias, which can be daunting, but then straightforward to maintain once they get started.

These changes should help make their audience feel even more welcome at their concerts, more engaged in the fine arts community, and confident their donations are being used well to support the NLC.

As for me, I enjoyed taking a macro view of the entire user’s experience and getting a new perspective on how many touchpoints can effect the user journey.