" Helping TTC Subway musicians earn money in cashless society. "

Torontune is an app for TTC musicians and commuters. TTC has provided a platform for subway musicians called “sound underground” for more than 35 years now. The process starts with an autidition every three years. TTC selects about 75 musical artists and issues them a licence with a unique ID. Torontune app helps those musicians to get donations, recognitions and encouragements through the convenience of an app.

As a team, we wanted to tackle a problem which could help our community. Our talented musicians have a platform with TTC, however many times these musicians don’t get enough recognition and appreciation for their talent and time. Ever since, people have started using smart pay, they tend to carry less cash or no cash at all. Commuters also are in a rush into getting to places and don’t have enough time to reward or donate these musicians. With all the social media exposure, musicians don’t have an online platform to share their profile. Commuters can’t see musician’s schedules and musician’s can’t see each other's schedules. There is no way to review TTC musicians, and find these musician’s contact information.

Our goal is to create an app for commuters and musicians. This app will allow users to scan musician ID to retrieve their profile so users can donate, review and contact musicians. So, even if commuters miss out an opportunity to donate or communicate with musicians at the spot then they can do so by simply creating a secure account with Torontune.

We planned to divide our project into few phases

We’ll start our project with the process of user research. We’ll gather the information by interviewing musicians and commuters and creating personas. From the finding, we will be generating information architecture map and user flow map.

After getting the vibe of the product and our target audience, we will be generating a brand where we’ll pick color scheme, typography, icons, buttons and logo.

Here we’ll be generating a wireframe which will turns into Prototype. We’ll put our product to test and collect some feedbacks from all types of users to improve our prototype. We’ll reevaluate our prototype and make changes to improve our product.

Here we’ll start coding our app in react native. We’ll use Firebase for database and create an email, create github, expo, or even slack account to stay connected and share our work among teammates.

Here we’ll start coding our app in react native. We’ll use Firebase for database and create an email, create github, expo, or even slack account to stay connected and share our work among teammates.

Topic Research: As a team, brainstorming ideas was very challenging. Infact searching for a topic took longer than we expected. We are all ambitious about solving problems. Therefore, we asked ourselves by making Torontune are we really making a difference? We decided to go ahead with idea because we may not be solving digital problems for everyone but we’ll definitely be helping one type of audience (TTC musicians and TTC commuters).

We emailed TTC to get permission to interview and record their musicians. They allowed us to record as long as musicians agree. They also send us station names where musicians are most likely to be performing. They did not provide any schedule or name. Therefore, one day we spent all day at the subway searching for musicians so we could interview them. In the end we ended up talking to approximately five musicians. Also, we interviewed people who is 20 years old and above, and using TTC regularly.

QUESTIONS FOR MUSICIANS

• What is it like to be a part of the TTC music team?
• What are some of the struggles as being perforformer on the street?
• How do you get paid ? how, cash on the spot only?
• Do you have a smartphone? Would you like it to get paid through an app? Would it be convenient?
• Would you trust to pay other street performers through an app or cash? Why?

QUESTIONS FOR TTC SUBWAY USERS

• Do you enjoy listening to street musicians?
• Have you ever rewarded them?
• How much of a donation will you be willing to give them? Min and max amount?
• Do you feel unhappy if you don’t have cash or coins when you want to reward them?
• Would you ever think of paying them through an app? Would you trust the process? Why and why not?

We got positive answers from the interviews. We found that many TTC subway users enjoy music that street musicians play and want to reward them. They answered that if there is a donation app, they will reward musicians more and easily. Musicians were excited to learn about the concept of our app. However, almost all of them agreed that they would download as long as this app is reliable and secure.

All users (musicians and commuters) can scan TTC unique id (qr scan) to retrieve musician’s profile. This profile will have biography, review, schedule and contact information.

All authorized users can donate to their favourite musicians by simply searching them through their name, id or station. The payment can be made by Paypal.

Users can see a musician's schedule through their profile or by searching stations. Stations have information about who is performing now and who will be performing next.

Users can view and add reviews for musicians. This can bring their ranking and might bring musicians to the front page as “featured musicians”.

Musicians have their contact information provided and any user can retrieve it through their profile.

Users can search for musicians by typing name, station and TTC ID. When found, users can view musicians' profiles.

Here is our final protytope after we conducted the user testing and iterated our design several time.