Brief Description

FrDancers* is a dance video platform designed for primarily to target amateur dancers with less than a year of dancing experience. Based on user interviews and user journey mapping of ITE College dancers, my team and I have come up with a concept app to push potential dancers to pursue dance, improve their dance skills and finally, gain enough confidence to join a dance programme.

This project aimed to solve Scape's design challenge - "How might we redesign our programmes to ensure that they are relevant and effective for our youths?".

Empathy

To gain an understanding of dancers in general, my team and I went around Scape to conduct some ad-hoc interviews. We wanted to know more about their goals and frustrations, and also whether they were adequately supported by either Scape or their schools when pursuing their dance aspirations, or both.

During our preliminary interviews with dancers that dance publicly in Scape, we asked a few questions to gain an understanding about their journey and hopefully some frustrations.

Some of the key research questions and responses we received were:

Are Scape dance programmes youth-centric?

• Most of the respondents do not know about the dance programmes organised by Scape; if asked to imagine what programmes they could hold, they would name competition/battles and performances. One respondent mentioned that the dance programmes might be catered to other dance types like hip-hop.
• A couple of the respondents know about the dance programmes because of their friends or that they saw some events happening in Scape but they did not join the dance programmes for themselves.
• Most of the respondents have not joined any dance programme.
• For the respondents that joined a dance programme, 3 of them mentioned that they have joined their school’s dance programme “Central Berserk” which they knew via word-of-mouth. They rate their experience of the dance programme 6/10 because the programmes are joined by experienced dancers and they felt too intimidated to sign up for it.

Conditions to joining a dance programme?

• 4 of the respondents were amateurs and they feel intimidated by dance programmes because they have the impression that they might embarrass themselves if they were to join.
• 3 of the respondents who have never joined any dance programmes mentioned that they had known about the Blackout dance competition organised by Scape but did not join as they thought they were too amateur.

Are the dancers in Scape supported by Scape to pursue their dreams and aspirations?

• Almost all of the respondents do not know about any support from Scape. When asked what they would expect, they would expect (listed below)

  • Community and peer support
  • Sponsorship to perform abroad
  • Be the forefront in promoting the arts (dance or any other)

User Persona

Based on the demographics of the 10 users we have interviewed, we constructed our User Persona, Nurul.

Background She is a hip-hop dancer who has been dancing for the past year. She is a student from ITE and she was inspired to dance because of her seniors and friends. She practices dance three to four times a week with her friends; of which on Saturday, she practices with her friends at Scape. Nurul finds Scape appealing because of its location and availability of mirrors to practice dance. Nurul wants to dance hip-hop with her friends in public via performances/showcases to gain some recognition and confidence in her craft, without getting intimidated by experienced dancers.

Frustrations

• Feels intimidated to join any dance programme because of her inexperience
• Difficult to find suitable dance programmes

Goals

• To perform with her friends through a dance programme i.e. performances.
• To practice dance and improve her dancing skills

User Journey Mapping

To identify the pain-points of a dancer as they transition from being a non-dancer to a dancer, we did 4 more expert interviews to understand their journey. Since we did not have the liberty of time to target all the pain-points throughout the entire journey, we have decided to target only a small area of their journey and only 2 pain-points in total (in bold).

1. Before dancing (learn about dance)
2. Start dancing
3. Practice dancing
4. Join a performance

With a clear idea on the frustrations and pain-points of amateur dancers, the next step would be ideation.