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A Tour-Date Widget that Performs Everywhere
The Client
JamBase has built its reputation as one of the most established names in music news and tour information by working tirelessly to help touring acts vibe with their fans. Their website and app reach more than 700,000 registered users, but JamBase also provides bands a wider suite of marketing tools they can use to stand out from the crowd. Musicians and promoters can create a custom campaign of targeted emails, make use of premium banner ads, and set up contests. JamBase’s devotion to forging connections between artists and audience have made them one of the most established and trusted brands serving the $31 billion live-music market.
The Project
To help bands easily and effectively share concert dates with their fans, JamBase was looking to create a user-friendly, embeddable widget that would display on any website and would slide effortlessly into any band’s existing look and feel. They were looking for something clean, modern and platform-agnostic that would perform dependably on mobile and desktop; and could easily be integrated by users who might not have programming experience. The widget would need to be customizable enough for musicians and promoters to select attributes that would make it feel like an organic part of their web presence.
The Challenge
Since JamBase works with thousands of bands in dozens of different genres, the widget’s visual design would have to be flexible enough to blend seamlessly into the look and feel of a wide variety of band’s websites.
For instance, some bands play multiple shows per week, while others play bigger shows less often, so the design would need to include options for visual weight within tour dates – whether it would be on day of the week, date or month. Bands would need to tailor the widget for touring approaches, not just personal styles and genres.
We would also need to balance accessibility with flexibility. The user interface would need to be both dynamic and reliable, and able to slot into websites representing a variety of styles, looks and personalities. But the widget would also need to be straightforward to use and easy for site visitors to take in visually, while also optimized to be accessible for the visually impaired.
It was important that we also minimize or eliminate coding from the process, since it would be end users, mostly musicians and promoters, incorporating the widget into their websites, not professional developers. This was especially challenging since the widget would have to connect to the back-end function for ticket buying based on the dates displayed.
The Approach
We’d essentially be conducting a widget-building exercise, but with a high degree of flexibility in look and feel to help capture the personalities of a wide variety of bands and promoters. High Seas strategists and UI experts began by assessing the competition and their offerings to identify opportunities for JamBase to differentiate and improve upon what was available elsewhere.
We then set out to design an intuitive user experience that would flow effortlessly from inputting info using preset options and themes, to then choosing options for customization, to finally simply pasting an automatically generate snippet of Javascript that would automatically pull in show dates and display them on their website via IFrame. So, in the end, musicians and promoters did not need to be particularly tech-savvy or to invest a lot of time to create a customized widget that worked reliably and looked good on their website.
The Result
Jambase launched their new tour date widget empowering bands to embed their tour dates right on their own websites, keeping the company not just on par with their competitors like BandsInTown who offered something similar, but with vastly superior customizability and flexibility.
Installing the widget is virtually effortless, and the intuitive user interface makes it easy to keep your site current. Thousands of bands and performing artists now use the widget, and are “Powered by JamBase!”
