Introduction

My bachelor’s thesis focused on the European hip-hop dance scene—a community that has received far too little attention in academia so far. The result is a final concept for an app specifically tailored to the needs of the European hip-hop dance scene.

Problems

The fragmentation and lack of a centralised platform tailored for the dance community, was a main Problem found in the community. Existing platforms were also not specifically designed to meet the unique needs of dancers and other stakeholders. A significant gap was also observed in the area of logistic support; existing platforms do not offer solutions to additional needs such as ride-sharing or accommodation when attending events in unfamiliar locations.

Goals

The Goals were directly linked to the research questions and therefore being able to answering them. Following the research questions throughout the thesis’s work, multiple smaller goals and requirements arose. Research questions were as follows: Challenges in Events and Community: What difficulties do European hip-hop dancers face in organizing and participating in dance events and within their dance communities? Platform for the Scene: What functions and features would be most useful for a platform dedicated to the European hip-hop dance scene? Events and Networking: Can such a platform support the organization of dance events and networking with local communities

Research / Analysis

I conducted 5 qualitative interviews, did a comprehensive benchmark analysis and send out a co-designed survey from which I received 32+ responses.

Ideation / Prototyping

Using card sorting, I then developed unique specifications for the platform based on the collected insights, utilizing the AOF method (Activity, Objects, and Features). This ultimately led to the creation of a prototype, which I was able to test and evaluate with dancers. The primary activity can be defined as ’Exploring, creating and acquiring information on dance-related events, communities, and training locations’. The big social object overarching every other object is ’dance’, followed by equally important objects like ’events’, ’communities’, ’training locations’, ’workshops’ and ’friends’. Building on these objects various specific features were derived.

User Testing and Results

To test the fresh prototype a total of 7 members of the targeted community underwent a 30-45 min long User Testing. The participants tested multiple scenarios / user flows to validate the design and give feedback on it. The testing was done remotely through Microsoft Teams and a Figma prototype link. Besides qualitative answers and feedback through thinking out loud some quantitative data in form of the UEQ was collected. Affinity Mapping and Card Sorting was once again used to collect and structure feedback. This allowed me to make another qualitative design iteration which then was presented as the final prototype. Feedback and wishes from testing, resulted in the implementation of an in-app messaging service, updated labels, wording, changes to call to action buttons, a reworked filter menu and a few layout changes. Overall the testing positively validated the conceptual design of such a platform and also included suggested potential, future implementations, or changes that were outside of the prototype’s scope.