A music-lessons marketplace that keeps students after the first lesson

The company

Since 2014, More Music Technologies has run a two-sided platform for private music lessons in four markets, with Musikundervisning.dk as its Danish site. Every teacher goes through rigorous checks, in line with its purpose: a safer, more transparent and more sustainable market for private music teaching.

Founded2014
WhereDenmark
ProductWeb platform
Websitemusikundervisning.dk ↗

The challenge

Musikundervisning.dk had no trouble attracting teachers. The harder part was students: turning a visit into a booked lesson, and a first lesson into a lasting commitment. The brief: raise conversion and the value students get, through better matching and more reasons to book again, without lowering the company’s safety standards.

The research question

To keep the work on the student’s side of the platform, I framed it around what keeps people learning an instrument: their motivation.

How can users be enabled to meet their motivational goals in learning music through increasing user engagement?

The process

I structured the four months on the Double Diamond, which gave each stage a clear purpose: qualitative and quantitative data, interviews with music learners and players, and concept testing, each step informing the next.

The Double Diamond: Discover and Define form the research diamond, Develop and Deliver the design diamond, each diverging then converging, with loops back between stages — The Double Diamond: research, then design, with room to loop back between stages.

The solution

Findings first; the research behind them follows below ↓

The concept. A community built into the company’s own website, around the lessons. It starts with the match: students search any kind of lesson to find the right teacher, and the skills and interests on their profile shape the groups and events suggested to them. Forums, groups and chats keep students and teachers in touch; jam sessions and events bring them together online and in person. Students get a safe space to learn and play together, and a reason to book the next lesson.

The prototype. We designed the concept as a mobile prototype. These are its key screens:

Home page: start your search, instrument icons, and a banner inviting students to ask the community — **Home page**Welcomes users with a dynamic interface for effortless searching across every type of lesson. A prominent banner invites them to explore the Community page and engage with fellow music enthusiasts.

Community tab with sub-categories of interest — **Community tab**Users delve deeper by selecting the sub-categories that interest them, which streamlines navigation and gives swift access to relevant discussions and content.

User profileEmpowers students to tailor their experience: they edit their personal information and choose which details to display publicly. Adding skills and interests enriches the profile and drives personalised recommendations for events and groups.

Community homepage with a post field and the latest posts — **Community homepage**The central hub of the platform and a rich browsing experience. Users explore, post and engage with content shared by others, with quick access to events and groups that improves discoverability and encourages active participation in the community.

Events page: recommended events, events others attend, and your events coming soon — **Events page**Showcases every type of event, with recommendations, upcoming events and post-event reviews, to enrich the experience with opportunities for learning, networking and cultural immersion.

Private conversation between two members about joining an orchestra — **Messaging**Facilitates communication and collaboration: users hold private conversations and exchange files, which fosters meaningful interactions and knowledge sharing among members.

Notification tray over the community homepage: new comments and likes — **Notifications**Replies, new messages and likes, gathered in one tray.

The research behind it

Discover

Desk research mapped the trends shaping the field, from social networks to matchmaking and gamification, and the platform’s own pain points: a star rating that says little about a teacher, and matching a student with the right teacher. A literature review covered online communities, engagement and gamification theory; a benchmark compared how six platforms build community. We then interviewed six people: five musicians and music students, and a trumpet teacher on the platform.

Define

A data-clustering workshop sorted everything into themes (communities, gamification, engagement, trends, benchmarks) and reshaped the problem into the research question above. The interviews set the direction: people keep playing because of other people. As one musician put it, “Music should be seen as a network, and not as a product.”

Personas

From the interviews we distilled four personas, covering the most common profiles among active users, each a group sharing one attitude: the Social Adventurer, the Advice Seeker, the Companionable Sophophile and the Community Manager.

Persona card: the Social Adventurer, a trumpet player looking for a band, with personality, jobs to be done, pains, practical needs, motivations and interview quotes

Persona card: the Advice Seeker, a violinist stuck in their progress who wants to talk to players in the same situation

Persona card: the Companionable Sophophile, a clarinet player who wants to stay in touch and share videos and pieces with other players

Persona card: the Community Manager, a big-band drummer who organises events and members

An ideation workshop then turned the personas’ pains into “How might we” questions and twenty-five possible features, grouped into three foundations: interaction between all users, events, and safe spaces to share.

Storyboards

The first storyboard shows the service as it was: a new student books a first lesson, finds nothing on the site beyond buying lessons, and cancels the renewal. The second changes at the fifth frame: the student finds forums, events and other users, their teacher suggests a violin group, and they book a bundle of ten lessons.

Status quo storyboard in eight frames, from considering an instrument to cancelling the renewal — Status quo: a first lesson, then nothing else to do on the platform.

Proposed concept storyboard in seven frames: considering an instrument, booking a first lesson, finding resources and events on the website, the teacher suggesting the violin group, booking a bundle of ten lessons — The proposed service: resources, events and a group around the lessons, and a reason to keep booking.

User journey

The journey map follows one persona, the Social Adventurer, a trumpet player losing motivation playing alone, as they look for a band through the platform: four stages (reflection, exploration, user-to-user interaction and completion), with emotions, touchpoints and possible pain points such as too many replies at once or a conversation that stops.

Journey map of the Social Adventurer: scenario and needs on the left; stages, actions, an emotion curve with quotes, touchpoints and possible pain points across the platform — The Social Adventurer's journey, one of the four personas, from feeling alone with their trumpet to finding a band.

Interaction flowchart

The journey shows one person’s side. The flowchart shows the conversation between two personas, each with their own interface: the Social Adventurer posts that they want to join a band, the Community Manager replies that a position is free, and they move to private messages until they agree to meet.

Motivational matrix

The matrix sets out the value each actor gives the others and what motivates each one. The platform wants revenue, through students who stay and book more lessons, publicity and better service quality; what most actors share is co-creation. The outlined focus area, the Social Adventurer, the Community Manager and the platform, is the trio the rest of the work follows. These motivations were assumptions drawn from the research, still to be validated with real platform users.

Service blueprint

We blueprinted the action that opens the door to the community: posting in the forum. Each step lines up the screen, the email, and the system and database work behind it. Organising it by channel rather than by actor, with the wireframe above each step, made it something designers and developers could read together.

Use cases

Two use cases zoom in on that same moment, with the conditions before and after it and the alternative paths where it can go wrong: a user who does not know how to tag a post, a post filed in the wrong category, an upload that fails.

Use case: creating a post, with actors, pre-condition, flow of events, alternative path and post-condition

Use case: waiting for a user to answer, with the back-end flow, alternative paths and the Community Manager's reply

Testing the concept

We tested the concept with two musicians, each playing one persona of the focus area from an individual brief: the Social Adventurer wanted to join an orchestra, the Community Manager needed a trumpet player. An interaction test through the wireframes, a persona-based walkthrough and a short interview followed.

Test set-up: an individual brief for each participant (explanation, scenario, questions, task), the interaction between the two users, and the post-interview questions — The test set-up: two individual briefs, one conversation, one post-interview.

What we learned

The core interaction worked. Both reached their goal and agreed to meet for an audition.
Private chat first. The chat felt safe for a first contact, before sharing personal details.
Trust needs a face. Trust depended on profile pictures.
Bands need their own voice. The Community Manager wanted a band profile, to speak as an organisation rather than a private person.
Smaller circles matter. Both valued closed groups, such as all the trumpet players or one teacher’s students.
Categories guide people. Browsing by category first made participants feel guided and taken care of.
A network for those without one. A community helps most people with no musical network yet, such as students who have just moved abroad.

From findings to the final proposal

We folded these findings into the concept and into the proposals we delivered: profiles that build trust, in line with the platform’s safety standards; organisation profiles for bands and orchestras; the private chat as a safe first contact; closed circles by instrument or by teacher, alongside the open forum; and categories as the way in. Next to explore: testing with the platform’s own users and all four personas, and blueprints and use cases for the other key moments (chatting, creating a profile, joining a group, taking part in an event).

With two test participants who were not platform users, these proposals set a direction to explore, not a validation: the next step was to test them with the people who use Musikundervisning.dk every day.

Handing over

We delivered a first, research-based answer to More Music Technologies’ question: research insights, four personas, the concept from storyboard to blueprint, a tested mobile prototype, and next steps. Deciding what to build, and when, was the company’s call. The work gave them a user-centred foundation for engagement, built on what keeps people playing music: other people.

Takeaways

Co-creation with real users. We reached one platform user in the interviews and none in the tests. Co-creating with them from the start grounds personas and solutions in real needs; it is the first thing I secure on a project now.
Test with every persona. Our test covered two of the four, so it could not show how every type uses the platform and interacts with the others.
Iterate, because every test moves the concept. One session with two people already changed it. A concept like this needs several rounds over a longer timeframe, and iterating with users keeps a team focused on the values people exchange rather than on features.