The site isn't used by one audience moving through one funnel. The goal wasn't to make every part of the site discoverable to everyone, it was to make the right part obvious to the person who needs it.
The Yawpers
A small website
with a lot of jobs.
The Yawpers needed one site to serve listeners, customers, press, venues, and the band itself. Most of those people need completely different things, and none of them should have to think about the rest.
Recorded from the live interface.
- Role
- Product design, visual design, development
- Scope
- Artist website / commerce / tour / press
- Approach
- Complex underneath. Simple in use.
The problem
Everyone is here
Everyone is here
for a reason.
01 / Public-facing
A fan might be looking for tickets to an upcoming show…
Tour date information is integrated using the Bandsintown API, ensuring it is always up to date and ticket links are available readily in one place.
buying a record…
Storefront is custom rather than embedded from a separate commerce platform.
or visiting the link in bio page after seeing a promotional post on social media.
02 / Industry collaborators
The fans shouldn’t find the advance streaming preview of an upcoming album, but it’s memorable for music journalists in a vast sea of private Soundcloud links.
Neither party has much use for localized social media assets and approved ad copy. Venues, however, prefer the simplicity of finding both on an individualized link, compared to weeding through a months-long email thread to find the most recent version of a zip file.
03 / Internal tools
The names and shipping addresses of the customers who order merch online need to stay internal, but fulfilling them should be as frictionless as possible for the band and their team.
order and fulfillment data is written to Firebase, and then displayed in an internal admin tool, which keeps a record of fulfillment and tracking, and sends transactional emails at purchase and shipment.
And the system that enables that can never see customers’ payment information either.
Square SDK handles payment processing, avoiding ever storing payment credentials.
The complexity of this project exists to keep its touchpoints simple. Overwhelming any given set of users, be it the public, industry collaborators, or the band themselves, would have a detrimental effect on the system’s utility.
The site works because each person gets solely the version of it they need, while the infrastructure underneath keep those experiences connected.
Next project / 02
R Cooper Long ↗︎
