Design
An interactive platform that helps local musicians find venues and helps venues discover emerging talent to bride the gap between people who make music and the spaces that hold it.
Boston has a thriving but fragmented open mic scene. Musicians spend hours searching Reddit threads, Facebook groups, and word-of-mouth to find nights worth attending. Venue owners, on the other hand, struggle to surface their events to the right audience. Boston Open Mic was designed to solve both problems in one place.
The platform lets musicians browse upcoming open mics by neighborhood, genre, and experience level, while giving venues a lightweight dashboard to manage listings, share details, and build a recurring audience.
Through a series of interviews with Boston-area musicians and bar owners, I identified a core mismatch: musicians wanted low-stakes, welcoming environments to perform — and venues wanted reliable foot traffic on slow nights. Neither group had a shared discovery tool.
Pain points included: scattered event information, no way to preview a venue's vibe before showing up, no sign-up mechanism for performers, and no feedback loop for venues to understand their audience.
"I just want to know if the place is welcoming before I show up with my guitar."
I started with competitive analysis of existing platforms like Eventbrite and Bandsintown, then moved into user interviews (6 musicians, 4 venue staff). Affinity mapping surfaced three primary jobs-to-be-done: discover, evaluate, and sign up.
From there I built low-fidelity wireframes and ran two rounds of usability testing to refine the browsing filters, venue profile format, and the performer sign-up flow. The final design emphasized warmth and clarity over feature density.
The final prototype was tested with 8 participants. All participants were able to find and sign up for an open mic within 3 minutes. Venue profiles received high marks for conveying atmosphere through photos and host descriptions, which directly addressed the biggest pain point surfaced in research.
Next steps include building out a mobile-responsive version and exploring a lightweight CMS for venue owners to manage listings without a technical background.